The Show Must Go On
by LockDown
Summary: Most people write fan fiction. She produced a TV show. Follow Natalia Zorah as she tries to manage her own TV studio while dealing with her relationship with a certain turian detective. Did I mention his sister is sleeping with two of the stars? G/T with Solana/Liara/Jane. OC is Tali's brother. AU warning. Rated for naughty things that Garrus and Jane did in their pasts.
1. Audition His

**The Show Must Go On (His Audition)**

Celebrity is a silly thing. Being famous for a singular action, especially an action that wasn't thought about but just done, is a silly thing. On top of that, the singular action got him things. Silly things. Things that he couldn't back down from. Not when she went through all that trouble to do this for him. Never mind that he had to use up a personal day to do this. It's not like he used them. So well known is that fact that the entire precinct was abuzz with rumors not long after he turned in the paperwork for his day off.

It could be worse though. At least he wasn't being invited to speak at some small community function any more. Or being given free things. Those first few months were the absolute worst. Thankfully it died down as time went by and only cropped up on very rare occasion. Like today.

When he met with the producer she had told him to introduce himself too he knew this would be a bad. He's a lead detective, he knows how to read people. He could see the producer's eye go big, which is quite the sight on a quarian, when the producer recognized him. He watched the producer's eyes flicker to the right side of his face and watched those eyes go even wider.

The producer immediately started jabbering to some other people, assistants maybe, about how he had the perfect build and stature they were looking for. How the role was practically written with him in mind. And if the other producers didn't see it the quarian producer would personally beat them until they did.

Word got around and crew members of various capacities came by to see him and say thank you. He told them what he always told them, that he was just doing his job at the time. You'd think a decade would make people forget about him. But the quarians are a very communal society, and a boon done for one of them is a boon done for them all. Likewise a slight against one can get you shut out just as quickly. Which can be a terrible thing as they have the best shops. In his opinion at least. So he was always polite with them, which wasn't hard to do with such charming people.

And of course other people started to ask questions. He was sure that pretty soon the quarians would start to compete with each other to tell the story. Embellishing it even more than it had already morphed over the years. If the quarians loved anything more than storytelling, he sure hadn't found it yet. And of course people of other species would come over and ask him how much of it was true.

Asari tended to like his humility about the tale, humans tended to admire his bravery, krogan his toughness, salarians his selfless nature. His fellow turians understood him when he said he was just doing what had to be done. Even the odd batarian would give him a nod of tacit approval. Once he even had a rachni worker feel the side of his face with a feeler. He wasn't quite sure what that was all about but that sort of sums up Citadel life for you. You never know who you are going to meet or what will happen that day.

Just take what happened 8 years ago. He'd just finished his C-Sec training and was given the day off. So he went to the Quarian Quarter to see a dance recital. Not what you would expect him to do but his sister had been hounding him to come see her. It spoke of just how good a dancer his sister was. Not just anyone got into the Zorah Dance Theatre Troupe and did it jumping the species barrier to boot. And his little sister can really dance. Though he will never tell anyone that he helps her practice when he has the time and they were on the same planet.

It was his sister that got him his ticket and the backstage pass. It's the only thing that saved his life. Things were turbulent then but the turmoil stayed in house as it were. As with most species, they liked to keep their problems out of the public eye of others. So he had no idea there had been a terror campaign by a separatist group that was on going at the time. And he had no idea that bombing a prestigious building full of important people was high up on the to do list of that group.

Fortunately the bomb went off early. The place wasn't packed yet but plenty of people still died. The worst part was that this group had done their homework and disabled the fire suppression system. Those that weren't blown to bits had to contend with the raging inferno that followed afterwards. Now he had gone back stage to see his sister before the show and was only just making his way back to his seat when things kicked off. And then he sprang into action.

All told he dragged 108 people from that burning building by the time help arrived. Most were performers and thus children that he hauled out in pairs. One over each shoulder. When you're pumped full of adrenaline 14 year old dancing girls aren't that heavy. Now this is where things get exaggerated or even politicized. At the time relations were very tense between the Quarian Confederation and the Turian Hierarchy over a couple of rich asteroid fields.

The real terrible version of the story was it was all planned by both sides as some sick publicity stunt. The wackjobs of the extranet always point to how the Hierarchy sent military advisors to help the Confederation stamp down hard on terror groups. Completely ignoring how twisted that conspiracy is, the Hierarchy has always come down hard on any group that harms its citizens. A few dozen killed citizens tends to rile up a state.

A happier version, if such a thing can exist from a tragedy, often portrays him in ridiculous proportions. The fanciest version he has heard personally, has him all buff and shirtless, in shorts, with long flowing fringe feathers as the flames lick up all around him but dare not touch him. Quarian story telling at its finest. Over time he's received some odd gifts but a very well drawn picture of that exact scene is perhaps his favorite. Who it was from he never found out except that it was drawn by one of the dancers he rescued.

The truth of course is nowhere near as flamboyant or as twisted. His fringe was singed something awful, his jacket, shirt sleeves and the lower parts of his trousers he had torn off to use as makeshift bandages. And he felt those flames. He was burned over most of his body though mercifully there wasn't any permanent damage from that. And most renditions of the story find some way of classing up the fact that the explosion had really messed up the right side of his body and face. In this day and age scars can be minimized if one got the right treatment early enough. He never made it to a medical center until hours afterwards. He kept refusing to take up a spot on a medical transport because there were those in much worst shape then himself.

He always told people he just did what had to be done at the time. Rescuing 70 odd kids and 30 odd adults tends to make people think kindly of you. Add in the fact that some of those he rescued were some of the quarian's elite there on the Citadel generated a few favors and a lot of good will. And he wasn't above using that good will if it helped out on a case which it did over the years. If a case had leads in the Quarian Quarter than he was assigned to be part of that case as a uniform. Once he made detective any and all cases quarian related landed on his desk. Once he made lead detective his whole team handled anything quarian related.

This of course led to him building up quite the rapport with quarians on the station and with quarians in general. He was C-Sec's go to guy as the years rolled by. Earned him quite the terrible nickname around the office too. "Quarian Quartermaster" is what people called him behind his back. Partly because he supposedly knew everything there was to know about the Quarian Quarter and was thus their unofficial keeper in C-Sec. The other reason was because his father worked at C-Sec as well. Captain of the section that he was part of. Yeah it's just as enjoyable as you would think it is.

Now it's perfectly normal for people to want to say thank you to you. It's far less normal for them to integrate themselves into your life. And he didn't even see it coming. It seemed so natural at the time and all traces back to his sister Solana.

Solana was the result of his father's second marriage. After his mother died his father got remarried and that is why his sister was 20 years his junior. And she is a really gifted dancer. Danced her way straight out of turian dance schools and into quarian ones. Oh she studied at asari and human ones too but if you wanted the best you went quarian. At least where dancing was concerned. And when he was home on leave he helped Solana practice her routines. When he moved to the Citadel to start up his career in C-sec and after the blast that continued. Only he was helping two girls work on routines from then on.

Solana was a friendly girl and had lots of friends. But everyone has a best friend and Solana's best friend happened to be a prodigy like herself. Coming from the fabled Zorah family certainly helped. The two of them were practically sisters before the bombing and afterwards they were even closer. It helped out some that among the people he had dragged out of that inferno was the then newly minted Admiral Zorah and his wife and son. Since then the Vakarian and Zorah families were rather close. And if the girls weren't at one residence they were at the other. It was rare to see one without the other being somewhere nearby.

As one would come to expect he had a soft spot in his heart for his girls as he called them. It's hard not to when you get to know them. And so he watched them grow up over the years. Or as much as he could with the line of work he was in. He honestly didn't know how his father did it. Especially after his father got promoted up to Executor of all of C-Sec.

Still he was around as much as he could be. He was there when Solana got shipped off to boot camp and _she_ cried and cried and moped for that entire summer. To cheer her up he ended up teaching her some basic self defense that Solana was learning. And he even got her brother Adrian and some of the neighborhood kids in on it as well to make it seem a little more appropriate. Someone his age alone with a girl that age for a few hours a day. He was no nest robber but he also wasn't dead. Any male with a pulse could tell she was already developing into quite the looker. Even at 15 she was quite the beauty with her piercing green eyes, fiery red mane of hair, cute button nose and lovely oval face. Throw in a lithe dancer's body and yeah he didn't need any rumors, no matter how unfounded, floating around.

Now every turian has to serve but not everyone serves in combat arms. Solana did all 8 years of her service in the Special Services branch. This branch, among other things, handled relations with other species. He was pretty sure that his father cashed in every single favor he had to get Solana assigned right back to her old life as an ambassador to the quarians. Officially she was a spreading good will and cultural understanding through the universal medium of dance. Really this meant that her military duty consisted of a physical once every 3 months to make sure she was up to standards. And he just signed off on her evaluations. He made her do the test of course no matter how much she whined about it. They were already bending the rules as far as they would go. He wasn't going to lie for her, even if she was his baby sister. Turians don't lie after all.

Oh, he had retired as a Commander from the turian military, so whoever was keeping track of Solana was more than happy to hand off the paper work to him and take his word on it. Strange yes but it worked. It kept the girls together and happy so things worked out. _She_ even tried taking the physical test a few times with Solana. Failed the first few times until she found out that the entire Vakarian household kept up with the military fitness routine. So she joined in until she could pass the physical test.

She'd been so proud that and truth be told, he was proud of her too. She stopped coming to exercise in the morning after that and he found that he missed her. She was always so bright and cheerful, even if she was completely exhausted from whatever strenuous activities they had just done.

That's when he knew he was in trouble. Naturally he never acted on it for so many reasons. And that was the year the girls decided they were going to start noticing boys. Which meant dressing up. Or over dressing. Or under dressing really. And so much make up. The worst part was he was the go to target to "test" out new looks or lines on.

It all had to do with his proximity to them. Since they spent so much time in each other company they were always together. And it wasn't uncommon for either to have dinner or even spend the night at each other's houses. That is all fine and good. Where this came to affect him was the fault of turian culture. He was fairly sure that had he been human or quarian things would have never happened the way they did.

Turians are rather long lived for a species. Not as long as asari or krogan of course but a 150 years average is rather respectable. Careful family planning helps keep things from getting too out of hand. Though its mostly cultural pressure to make sure one can provide for one's family that keeps population from exploding. Part of that is having massive family housing compounds. It helps the family take care of its members no matter their age or relation to each other. When he was still in the service he would go spend his leave time back on Palaven at the family compound. Where his great grandparents, grandparents, numerous aunts and uncles and cousins all lived. So when he moved to the Citadel he didn't think it odd at all that he moved in with his father and his family. Some of his human colleagues thought it was must be some sort of weird turian punishment.

But that is why he was around the girls in the evenings and on the weekends. Provided he didn't get called in to deal with something. Weekends were terrible. His father and stepmother often left the house which left him alone with the girls. And they were shameless. Well she was. Solana was shameless in that he was pretty sure she encouraged her to be so shameless.

All things considered he thought he handled it as well as such awkward moments could be handled. Thankfully she learned some tact and they were able to strike up a real relationship by the time she was 17. Not in that way. She was still completely illegal according to quarian law. That was just the time she went from being categorized as his sister's best friend to being Tali, a young lady that he knew who happened to spend a lot of time at his residence.

It doesn't seem like much and in all honesty nothing changed between them. But being able to have an actual conversation that had substance to it does change how one views a person. And this change didn't come out of the blue. At 17 quarians start their apprenticeship. For them it's a 5 year program that teaches them the ins and out of a field of study. For Tali it was dancing and aspects such as business management that went along with it.

And at the end of that 5 year process Tali was considered an adult at the age of 22. Truth be told he always suspected that Tali spent her later teenage years at the Vakarian household because they were rather lax about some things. After Solana graduated basic training at the summer of her 15th year, she was an adult in turian society. This meant that she could get drunk or high or do whatever she wanted. Within the confines of the law. And Tali definitely piggybacked off of her best friend.

They weren't overly wild about things. Just smart. The night they got drunk for the first time they had asked him to watch over them. And they had done it on a weekend so they would have recovery time. And so that Tali could sober up before going back to her own house. It was a repeat performance the first time they got high.

And honestly he thought that was the way it ought to be done. The multitude of extra amendments that laws on the Citadel had just concerning humans and various forms of substance consumption were quite tedious. Granted humans had to wait until they had completed a 4 year program to be considered adults and thus could legally consume alcohol or other controlled substances. Salarians were adults after a year while krogan and asari were at the other end of the spectrum with 70 and 100 respectively. But considering the lifespan of the species it all made sense.

Mercifully both cases were pretty tame. Solana turned out to be a loud brash drunk while Tali was a chatty then sleepy one. He was never quite sure what they saw when they were high but they had spent the evening staring at their hands and each other's hair for a solid hour before crashing and sleeping it off. Kept whispering to each other "Do you see?" and "yeah" over and over.

Of course those were isolated incidents. At least to his knowledge neither girl got into any trouble that required C-Sec to show up. But that didn't stop him from seeing her. The year she turned 19 was the year that Adrian turned 17. And Adrian wanted to go into C-Sec. Granted it was a turian institute so Adrian didn't get to have the typical experience of a quarian apprentice. Adrian probably had it worse. Sure once he made it out of the training academy Adrian was placed under his loose supervision. If he worked a case Adrian was one of the officers working that case. That was about as far as the favoritism went. He also pushed Adrian mercilessly as he taught the young quarian what he knew.

And this is where Tali came into the picture. She brought them lunch most days. Sometimes with Solana in tow, sometimes alone she made sure they didn't starve to death. And if they were working late that night she usually showed up with some dinner as well. She'd normally stay and talk to them during those nights. And lecture them about missing meals.

It was routine really. Just like taking her to the C-Sec annual gala was. This too started the year Adrian joined C-Sec. He went stag to the event every year up to that point. In the beginning he went because his father forced him to. As he rose in rank he went because it was good to network and set an example. And because rich older ladies tended to part with their donation money easier if a ruggedly handsome older officer chatted and danced with them. Hey they have to get their funding from somewhere and C-Sec wasn't above pimping him out for an evening. When Tali found out about that she wasn't exactly happy. Solana thought it was hilarious. Until Tali roped her into being Adrian's date that year. He is pretty sure that Tali had to bribe her with a shopping spree. The Vakarian's did alright but the Zorah's were old money in the quarian world.

Between turian freedoms and quarian money, they got into just as much trouble as one would expect. But spirits if they weren't the most beautiful ladies on the dance floor that year. And the year after that. And the year after that. It became a given. It was part of the routine. He still had to do his share of talking to and dancing with donors or their wives but at least he got a few dances with a sparkling young beauty as well.

He's pretty sure that is where it happened. In between dances with donors he would have a break or dance with her. And she had apparently done her research. She knew with donors gave the most and gave him talking points to discuss with them. He'd always been in the running for one of the top "earners" at the gala but that year with her help he took that rather dubious honor. That was also when he found himself taking advice from her. It was always useful and never was unwanted or overbearing.

That too became part of the routine. He found that listening to her usually was a good idea. She usually was right and she didn't pout or sulk if he just did what she wanted him to. And it usually wasn't that hard to do. Granted this time around it was a bit extreme. He had to take a personal day after all. But as she pointed out he never used them until his father was forced to make him use them by C-Sec policy.

And that is how Garrus Vakarian ended up spending a personal day auditioning for some multi species TV show called _Mass Effect_.


	2. Audition Hers

**The Show Must Go On (Audition Hers)**

** "**Natalia Zorah what have you talked my imaginary brother into?"

They laugh about it now but once upon a time Tali thought that her best friend Solana didn't have a brother. After all he was never around. Always at this magical "away" land that wasn't on the Citadel. And he never visited. All Solana had were pictures. And really, they could just be of any random turian. Tali honestly thought that Solana was jealous that she had a sibling, a younger brother named Adrian, and that Solana didn't. Thus the whole fake older brother who is always away thing. But Solana swore up and down she had an older brother. Tali had just said they could share Adrian as a sibling until Solana's brother came home.

When you're eight that sort of logic works. The girls shared everything as it was anyways when they could and still did to this day. They were sisters in everything but biology. After all, Tali was a quarian and Solana was a turian. But they shared an unrivaled passion for dance which is how they met. Tali got in due to family connections backing up her abilities while Solana danced her way to a scholarship.

And it was that scholarship that kept them together over the years. The Zorah Dance Theatre Troup is highly prestigious and just as expensive. However they did put on free performances now and again. Granted one needed to reserve their ticket if anyone wanted a chance to get in but it was still free to the public.

It would be at one of those free performances that Tali finally met Solana's fabled older brother but she didn't know it at the time. It wasn't until several weeks afterwards when she was at Solana's house one weekend she would put together that Solana's brother was the same turian that had rescued 108 people from the bombed out and burning theatre. At the time she was far more occupied being terrified and hiding in a closet with Solana after the explosion occurred.

She's not above admitting that she immediately developed a crush on him. Tall handsome guy rescues you from an inferno, what's not to crush on? But she kept it to herself. He was her best friend's brother. She was pretty sure there were rules against this sort of thing. The best friend's brother thing. It didn't even enter her mind just how much older he was and that pitfall until a few years down the road.

That's not to say she didn't try her hand at seducing him. Or attempt to try to seduce him. Yeah it's as embarrassing now as it was back then. There was the attempts that included make up. Far far too much make up. And the sheerest veil that she thought that she could get away with. He did notice though. He made a comment about her using too much foundation. And that she really didn't need that much make up. Or any at all. She was pretty enough to attract the attention of any boy she wanted. He thought both of them were.

They were 15 then and that was when Solana suspected something about her best friend. A few months later Tali changed up her oh so subtle approach methods by switching to using clothing. Or really, a lack of it. That too ended in disappointing results. She wore tighter, more form fitting clothing that really flaunted her assets whenever she was over at the Vakarian household. Her parents would have killed her if they knew she even owned such clothes, so Tali kept a few choice sets of clothes in Solana's room just to throw on whenever he was home. All he said was that Solana and her turian ways must really be rubbing off on her.

That might seem an odd thing to say but it made sense. Turians aren't big fans of clothing when they are in a private setting. Clothing is nothing more than a superfluous vanity. In the turian civilization, clothing came about as a means of showing off wealth or to combat climate conditions. Later it was used as a faster means of clan identification. Add in the fact that turians were an avian species and thus their sexual organs are internal. Turians felt no need to cover up things that were already covered up. So in the privacy of a home, clothing wasn't needed to do any of those things. Tali's flaunting strip teases, for lack of a better description, were thus just seen as her feeling comfortable in the Vakarian household. And so no one batted an eye at her revealing wardrobe. This of course was very disappointing to the young quarian. She had thought about removing her veil but she was already pushing the limits of her comfort zone by wearing extremely sheer veils when she was at the Vakarian's.

Quarians, both male and female, covered their faces at all times. Whether done with scarves, masks, huge visors, helmets or veils, the face was obscured in some fashion. This even carried over to the home where the only place one didn't hide their face was in the privacy of the washroom or their sleeping room. This practice stemmed from the quarians ancient past when merchants were cross the great plains of Rannoch on long trade routes. Then it was a simple practical matter of covering up under the hot sun. Later it became somewhat spiritual.

Being the expert traders that they were, quarians traded in everything under the sun up to and including their very selves. According to legend, one such merchant had sold themselves into slavery for a period of time and had covered their face for the entire time. When the contract was up, the slave's former master asked why they had kept their face covered up. The slave had famously replied, "You bought my body, not my soul."

So while every species faces are used to identify individuals, for quarians the face is a very deep and personal thing. Showing all of your face, unobstructed in any way, to someone was an extremely intimate thing. You were after all, literally bearing your soul to someone. So while Tali's make up gambit had required that she wear a sheer enough veil so that all her work could be seen, she still was wearing a veil.

Tali had been crushed and moped for a week after the failed clothing experiment. It was enough that Solana had point blank asked her what had made her so sad. Growing up with a turian had made a few things rub off on Tali, including that terrible never lying thing. So Tali told Solana about her crush on Solana's older brother. Solana ended up falling off the bed because she was laughing so hard. Tali had responded by hitting her with a pillow. Solana naturally didn't let this go unanswered and a pillow fight broke out between the two teens. It was juvenile but it was fun and sometimes simple fun is what's needed to cure a bad mood.

A simple pillow fight couldn't lift Tali's spirits later that year. That summer Solana had been shipped off to basic training to start her mandatory 8 years of military service period. For the first time Tali was without her best friend for more than a few days. She coped with it by moping around at the Vakarian's from time to time. Mostly times that coincided with him being there. After a few weeks he had gotten fed up with her offered to teach her self defense to give her something to do that summer since she clearly had too much free time.

The first few lessons were private. Just the two of them in the Zorah family gym. And at first Tali really did throw herself into the training. Self defense is a great skill to have after all. But those lessons also meant she found herself in the strong arms of a certain turian. For a few seconds she would get to feel safe in his embrace. Then she'd feel his arms tense and he'd try to throw her to the ground while she was supposed to get out of his hold. Most of the time she ended up on the matted floor.

But she learned. Eventually she wasn't spending so much time on the floor. And she also learned how to buy herself a few extra seconds of safe time in certain situations. She was a towering 6'2" by then which was good because he was an even more towering 6'6". Whenever he was behind her this meant that all she had to do was tilt her torso forwards a little and her rear would be firmly pressed up against the front of his pelvic region. Doing that usually bought her about 2 more seconds of upright time as it were. On some level those 2 seconds made her very happy. On another level it did sort of piss her off.

Now Tali isn't vain but she knew for a fact that she had one fine ass. After her long tone legs, her ass was her best physical feature. A few asari classmates had told her so. It made her feel better about her lack of a bust to know that she still had some very appealing characteristics. To only get 2 seconds worth of reaction from him was both gratifying and insulting. At the time she was convinced that her little gesture was supposed to lead to more. How that was supposed to come pass she wasn't sure. But at the time she used to dream that somehow her little gesture would unhinge his restraint and they'd end up making love right there on the gym floor.

However, life doesn't work like a teenager's fantasies. Most definitely for the better. That is not to say that he wasn't affected. They never said a word about it but every now and again he may or may not have leaned a little into her. And she may or may not have felt a distinct bulge where one had not been before. And that is how their first few lesson's were. Plain and simple with an undercurrent of some physical flirtation and a heaping dose of underlying sexual tension.

Fortunately any flushed looks and heavy breathing could be explained away as just part of the physical work they were doing. Doubly fortunate is the fact that turian males are notoriously hard to the point of actual deployment as it were. That bulge Tali had become accustom to feeling would have been impossible to see from any distance.

Their dangerous game continued like that until she screwed it up. Maybe if she hadn't been so bold or taken smaller steps things would have continued.

On that particular day he was teaching her to get a position called The Mount. It's where you straddle your opponents chest with your knees in their ribs while you pummel on their face. And he was teaching her to get there from what was their normal standing position. Her back melded his front. The pretense of even a little space between them had quickly been dropped. She had pressed herself flush against him and he hadn't rebuked her.

He'd throw her down and try to mount her. All she had to do was flip over onto her back. When he came at her she would open up her legs and capture him between powerful thighs, locking her ankles behind his back. This kept him from getting further up her body and gave her control of the fight. It also let her press herself right up against him. From there she was to flip them over so that he was the one on his back. Then she had to shimmy up a little and she was in the mount.

Of course this is all easier said than done. Even when you are concentrating on just that alone. She wasn't. So it took until the end of the lesson until she finally did it properly. Now a few things should be noted about this position. First and foremost it allowed her to look into his eyes, something she rarely did as she was almost never facing him during a lesson. From her perch atop him she could look down and see astonishment give way to pride. But underneath that pride was restrained arousal. He may have been most gallant about keeping things mostly harmless but she had never really seen the effect of her handiwork had on him. It should have frightened her. Instead it empowered her. She shimmied her hips back down to his and _ground._

He should have made her stop immediately. He really should have. But she had a way of clouding his mind. And it had a been a while. A long, long while since anyone had done anything like that to him. And honestly, the fact that the usually sweet and innocent Tali was doing such an overt action of that nature had shocked him into none action. He could argue away the previous level of physical contact they had had with each other as necessary for teaching. He couldn't with this.

The second thing that the mount is that it put her on top of him, leaning over him. Now she had long red hair that went down to her should blades. Whenever she was doing something like dancing or her lessons with him she would put it up in a bun or braid. On that day it had been in a bun. Had being the key word. All that throwing around meant that her hair was completely loose by this point so that when she leaned down towards his face her hair created this curtain around them that shut the world.

More importantly this move meant that he had a clear view of her face. The front flap of her veil obeyed gravity and swung forwards with her when she leaned down and pressed her lips to his. It's a common belief that turians don't have any lips and thus don't kiss. She knows for a fact that they do have very thin lips and that they do kiss. She knows because he kissed back.

It was then that his phone went off with a preset alarm signaling that their lesson was over. She breathlessly dismounted him, made her way to her room, and took a really long shower.

After that lessons were different. He had invited her younger brother Adrian to join in the self defense lessons. And Adrian invited a few friends so the class size grew. Word got around the neighborhood and by the end of that summer he was teaching a class of some 30 kids how to defend themselves in a fight.

It's not that they didn't talk about what happened. In between that lesson and the next they had a little chat about it. He was very turian about it. Laid out why they couldn't let anything like that happen again. He even showed her a copy of all the laws that he would be breaking if he let things get to the natural conclusion of any continued activity in that light. He explained about how he still cared for her and didn't hate her or anything like that. He thought she was just acting on hormones and that it was perfectly normal for a girl her age. But it wasn't for a man his age and he had to be the adult.

So he removed himself from the equation by making sure they weren't alone in such close proximity any more. He had had a chat with her father mentioning that it might be a good idea for Adrian to start learning self defense as well. Sure Adrian as only 13 at the time but it was never too early to start. Turians started learning at age 6 after all.

Tali kept herself together for the entire conversation and even that day that she spent over at the Vakarian's place. Her mother was grooming her to take over the management of the family business and as such Tali was a bit more mature than girls her age. She had to be to put up with all the demands her family put on her. Part of her spending so much time at the Vakarian's was to decompress and get away from all that at her own home.

However, it came in handy in that particular conversation. She was able to recognize that he was doing what was best for both of them. She was legally a child for 7 more years and nothing could happen between them. It just couldn't. She knew that an unbridled burst of passion like she had had could ruin him. He'd be sent off to a penal battalion and they'd never see each other again. Those were the facts.

That's not to say that there wasn't a part of her that wanted to scream that she loved him and they could run away together. She had the credit card her father gave her so they would have that for money. They could go somewhere far away where no one knew them. Later that night when she thought over that plan she did come to realize just how stupid it sounded and was grateful that she had had the presence of mind not to say any of that. 7 years. She could wait that long. She just had to make sure he did too.

Now relationships are more than just two people being physical with each other. They are based on trust, love, support, understanding and a whole plethora of other factors. Which is why most couples that succumb to the physical attraction to each other often break up if their relationship can't transcend from being purely physical. If the relationship removes the physical portion entirely, there is nothing left but all the other factors. And that is what she set out to build upon.

With Solana gone Tali spent her free time with him. It was always somewhere public. If she went over to the Vakarian's and it was just the two of them, he would simply go to his room, one of the few places in the house she wasn't allowed to go. So they went out on things that were not dates. He taught her how to shoot a rifle. She taught him how to swim. They went rock climbing, hiking, built an omni tool from scratch, even went fishing on the Presidium.

When Solana came back at the end of the summer their not dates both did and didn't end. They weren't as nearly as frequent as they were. Which made sense. He had work like always except Tali had things like school once again. And spent most of her free time with Solana. So maybe once a month their schedules would sync up and the three of them might go out and do something.

And that is how it was as the years counted down. They developed a real relationship and she was infinitely happy with what they had. Not that she wasn't itching for more but she was content with what they had.

Part of the benefits of having a turian as a best friend is that they will let you order things on the extranet and have it shipped to their house instead of yours. So that's how Tali managed to get her hands on something that would help scratch that particular itch. If that package had come to her house she would have had the universe's most embarrassing conversation with her mother. Again. So thanks to the wonders of the extranet that particular package was shipped to the Vakarian house with Solana's name on it.

Now due to what can only be considered poor timing, Solana opened the package in eyeshot of her parents and brother. Now having finished basic Solana was an adult but that didn't stop her mother from having a conversation with her daughter. Now turians don't lie but Solana never told anyone that she hadn't ordered that package. Her family just assumed, so Solana never had to say that Tali had ordered a turian toy. That's not to say she handed it over free of charge. She held it hostage until Tali bought her a ridiculously expensive silk dress that she had coveted for years.

If she was ever tempted to stray off herself proclaimed path it was during her early apprentice years. She had continued to develop as a fine young woman and was asked out a lot. She did go out on dates with some interesting young men. Mostly quarians but there were a few turians and even a human. And they were interesting with all sorts of backgrounds. But she always compared them to him and they always were found wanting. Perhaps if she hadn't known him she would have married one of her suitors.

But word gets around. She wasn't easy and wasn't cheap and her height intimidated some people. So after her first year of apprenticeship date offers dried up considerably. Which didn't bother her. She became rather busy with her studies and liked to spend her little free time at the Vakarian's. All date offers stopped completely her second year. That is when she started to attend the C-Sec annual gala as his date.

Well maybe more as his piece of arm candy since they certainly weren't dating. And she certainly wasn't there because she had heard from Adrian some of the stories he had heard of Vakarian the younger schmoozing with rich old ladies. Okay to be fair the women were his around his age but that didn't stop her from being jealous of them. But she would rise above.

She did a little research and saw just how much he did pull in at this donation event. And so she helped him out. Getting donations for the Theatre was something she was learning to do and so she unleashed every weapon in her arsenal to help him do just that for C-sec.

Of course it wasn't a matter of just showing up as his not date at event he had famously gone stag to for years. Fortunately she did have an in. Adrian, as a rookie and a quarian, was being forced to go by Executor Vakarian as an example of interspecies cooperation and professional development. Now he could have just as easily gone stag like his mentor but Tali wasn't going to have it. Adrian needed a date. And Solana was going to be that date. Adrian caved because she was his big sister and she knew how to get him to do things. And because he knew what she was after and she would be insufferable if he denied her. One thing that Adrian had learned long ago was that his sister always go what she wanted in the end. Life was just easier if you gave it to her up front.

Solana on the other hand did not agree as meekly as Adrian had. Now the Vakarians do rather well for themselves and Solana was never without growing up. But the Zorahs had money. Which meant that Tali had money. Always had. It wasn't something that the girls abused and it was never an issue in their friendship. But sometimes, on very rare occasions Solana took advantage of Tali's near limitless funds. The C-Sec gala was one such occurrence.

It's not to say Tali didn't let herself enjoy the spa treatments, shopping spree, and the profession hair and makeup appointments that Solana insisted on. And the end result can't be argued with. Adrian was tongue tied from the house to the gala. Garrus had recovered from being rendered speechless much sooner and complimented her, telling her she looked gorgeous.

She did not swoon. No matter what Solana says Tali stoutly refused to admit that she swooned then. Nor did she swoon any other time that evening he told her how beautiful she looked. She did not blush either. Nope. Not once. Definitely didn't blush. Especially at the end of the night when he thanked her for all her help and reached out and took her hands and gave them a squeeze. It's such an innocent gesture but it meant a lot to her.

It was represented hope that she wasn't unrequited. Maybe she was reading too much into it but she let herself have that hope. She let herself hope a little more when he used the prize money he earned for being the top earner at the gala to take her out on a very nice dinner as a thank you.

For his 40th birthday she helped Solana throw a small family party for him. In return he managed to get tickets to a midnight premier of _Fleet and Flotilla._ He only managed a pair of tickets so only the girls went but he escorted them to and from that screening.

Right around the time of their meeting, _Fleet and Flotilla_ the book series had launched itself onto the galactic stage. As silly as it sounds, racism in media is still very much a things. Certain species could only be portrayed in certain fashions otherwise editors nixed the work. Above all, interspecies couples were just not a thing in the media. Even though it was perfectly okay in real life, the media lived in its own special little world.

So when a completely unknown author self publishes a book featuring a mixed species romance makes it big, the universe takes notice. Tali and Solana read the first book right after the bombing and had completely fallen in love with the series. They were both beside themselves when he got gave them their tickets to the movie.

Not long after that things got a little crazy. There was a salarian civil war that spilled onto the Citadel. Fighting was mostly contained to the salarian section of the Citadel but that didn't stop C-Sec personnel from getting hurt or even killed during the upheaval. As with every good civil war comes militia groups and with militia groups comes untrained combatants that don't play by the rules. And part of those rules include not bombing third parties.

A salarian C-Sec officer sympathetic to one of the groups had planted a bomb at a check point to the salarian sector. By chance Garrus and Adrian were headed off to lunch and walking by the check point when the bomb went off. All things considered, they were extremely lucky. Apart from being riddled with shrapnel they both lost their hearing. Both were rendered deaf by the explosion.

Now given the day and age they lived in, this was reversible through the power of omnigel and modern technology. Omnigel wasn't a miracle cure but it did help with the healing process. And one simply didn't just put in hearing implants and call it a day. There was a long drawn out procedure to it as Tali later found out.

She spent a little time at the hospital where the boys were laid up. She wasn't allowed to see Garrus because she wasn't family but she naturally visited her brother with her family. Once she found out their diagnosis she met up with Solana and they both threw themselves into research.

They read up on side effects, they looked at hearing aids, they learned sign language and made the boys learn it as well. Though they would eventually get their hearing restored, it was a long 4 months before that could happen. Til then Tali was very insistent that everyone learn sign language.

Thanks to biology, turian and quarian sign language was rather similar. And thanks to both species being space faring and in contact with each other for so long, there was an unified sign language. It wasn't perfect since quarian had a few letters that turian didn't and it's amazingly hard to sign subharmonics that make up a lot of turian speech. It can be done but signing a word that had subharmonics was a rather lengthy process.

She convinced her parents that making Adrian learn sign would be a competitive edge for his C-Sec career. It would set him apart from other officers and show that he wasn't just being lazy during his medical leave period. So that her brother a private tutor. Tali would sit in and learn the lesson as well. Then she'd go to the Vakarian's and teach them the lesson she had just learned herself. It made for some really long days and she was rather grateful when they got their hearing back.

Adrian got straight implants which were top of the line. C-Sec insurance doesn't go that high so Garrus got hearing aids. They got the job done and he had the added benefit of being able to take his out and shut out the world. He had become rather comfortable with the silence over time and enjoyed having the ability to block out people.

Life returned to normal and time marched on by. Tali saw more and more responsibility given to her and she took it in stride. She enjoyed her apprenticeship but was immensely glad when it finally ended. She was just as glad when her birthday rolled around not long after.

In accordance with tradition, her family threw a huge party. It was her coming out party, signaling the end of her childhood. There were tons of presents from family and friends and the multitude of strangers that were invited. The upper class never miss out on a social occasion and her birthday was the occasion of the season this year. Of course it was good for networking and so she put up with it. She was more than capable of working a room, just like she did at the C-Sec gala every year.

She did invite the Vakarian's to the party. Solana was there early to help her get all dressed up. They braided her hair up into a crown top her head so that it hid the circlet that held her veil in place. They put on some light make up and even some dark red lip stick. And finally they got her into a deep blue satin evening gown. It was a little bold, going in a backless and strapless gown but she was an adult now. She could do that.

Executor and Mrs. Vakarian came with the sea of guests when the party kicked off. He showed up fashionably late and made quite the entrance. Now everyone gets announced at these sorts of parties when they get there. But as one would expect, the drone of the announcer plus the buzz of the party itself all just sorts of melts to the background so unless you are paying particular attention, the announcement gets lost in a sea of noise.

However, once the stream of guests dies down and a new guest gets announced, that announcement has a way of cutting through the noise of the party. So when a Commander Garrus Vakarian arrived, people took notice for a moment. And it would have only been a momentary notice if she hadn't done something later that evening.

She of course heard the announcement but she couldn't exactly rush off to greet him. She was too busy listening to older women give her advice about everything under the sun. And everything under the moon too, which was rather embarrassing. Mercifully she was rescued by her father.

Tradition stated that the coming of age adult danced with one of their parents. In this case, Tali danced with her father in what was known as the "Last Dance." It was suppose to symbolize that the child had grown up and was on their own now. The dance floor was cleared and guests watched Tali waltz with her father. And while that was going on, young men lined the edge of the dance floor.

After the Last Dance came the "First Dance", which was supposed to symbolized the new adult's first independent decision. It also had a romantic place in quarian lore of being where many great love stories started. So would be suitors lined the dance area hoping to catch her eye while she danced with her father. Of course it didn't mean she was engaged to the fellow she picked or anything like that. Sometimes First Dances were picked for political reasons or because the new adult felt safe with someone or for shock value.

Tali had seen First Dances where it had been arranged just to get two companies' names in the paper. She'd seen one of her cousins come of the closet on her First Dance. And she'd seen quite a few people dance with siblings. Siblings were the safe, acceptable choice and would have been Tali's fall back if he had failed to show up. She had thought about dancing with Solana for a laugh but too many people would have read into it in the wrong way.

Thankfully, he did show up and had easily pushed his way to the front of the audience. He looked very handsome in his dark green suit, with a board of ribbons on one breast and a cluster of medals on the other. It really made him standout against the others in military uniforms. Young lieutenants with only a few ribbons that everyone got.

After her sedated Last Dance with her father Tali bee lined towards Garrus. She didn't even go through the charade of pretending to contemplate her choices. She knew from having dance with him before that he could dance. So she ordered up a tango and they set that dance floor on fire.

Afterwards the party resumed. Dinner was served and the dance floor was now open to all. Tali was whisked away to talk to various people. She spotted him now and again which was easy since he was a full head taller than most guests. He'd be talking with various other guests. Mostly the older military types. The younger ones seemed to avoid him for some reason.

It wasn't until after midnight she managed to get a moment to breathe. She had slipped away to one of the balconies on the second floor of the ball room. Her folks had naturally rented out the biggest and most expensive hotel to throw this party.

"So this is where you ran off to."

Tali turned her head to see Garrus close the door to the balcony, shutting out the music and chatter of the party and leaving them with the natural sounds of the Citadel during the night cycle.

"Yeah. I need a little break."

"Well I haven't had a chance to say happy birthday yet. So happy birthday Natalia." Garrus said as he walked up to her with his arms open.

Tali gladly stepped into the hug he offered her and hugged him back. Hugs had been deemed safe long ago and were perfectly normal. They didn't last very long but they were always pleasant to receive.

When he didn't step away from her and let the hug continue Tali let the reprimand she had been preparing die in her throat. She had planned on chiding him for calling her 'Natalia' as she much preferred 'Tali'. She couldn't let him know that she really did like it when he said her name. Very few people used her full name so it was special when someone did. Especially when he did it.

"I have to apologize to you. I forgot to bring your present to the party."

She felt him speak as such as she heard him. She had tucked her head under his chin and had her ear against the base of this throat.

"Oh." Was her disappointed reply. "Is this suppose to make up for that?"

She was disappointed, yes. Here she was on a star lit balcony, alone and in the romantic embrace of the man she deeply care for. She wasn't expecting to immediately jump him now that she was an adult and thus legal. She wasn't ready for that and besides they had never even talked about it. They were just them and their relationship just existed as what it was. He kept a certain distance between them and she did her best to challenge that distance in small ways. So she'd been rather delighted with this embrace until now.

Garrus pulled back a little so he could look down at her as he gently placed a talon under her chin to get her to look at him. "You look so amazing this evening." He breathed. "But this," he gestured between them, "this is just us. I got you a box of those turian chocolates you like so much. Forgot them in my room." He said pulling her back into the deeper embrace.

"Oh." Was her reply once more. This time she had said it with a mix of surprise and contentment. This was his way of accepting them and she was alright with that. They just had to work out what they were exactly. But they could do that now. And so they held each other in a comfortable silence until Tali broke it.

"Kiss me."

"Natalia."

"Please? Just once. It's my birthday."

They'd pulled apart once more to be able to look at each other. He didn't say anything as he searched her eyes with his.

"Please." Tali begged. She hadn't meant to but the silence was killing her as was his inaction. But that seemed to do the trick because one of his hands was on her neck, guiding her head just a little to the side as he leaned down to give her what she asked for. It was a good thing he already had an arm around her waist because by the end of their kiss he was helping to keep her standing.

She was left literally breathless at the end when he tucked her back into what was her spot in their embrace once again. They just stood there listening to each other's breathe slow down to a much more normal pace.

"You look really dashing. I didn't know you had this uniform." She said running a finger over one of the medals that was in her line of sight.

"Solana hid my C-Sec dress uniform and had laid this out for me. I can technically wear it no problem but I really should be wearing C-Sec colors. Dad will give me an earful in the morning."

Tali laughed. "Well you would have looked dashing in your C-Sec dress uniform as well. Just not as many doodads."

"I think that is why Solana hid my C-Sec uniform. She knew I had more 'doodads' on this old uniform." Garrus mused.

"I'll have to thank her then."

"Don't that will only encourage her."

"I know."

They couldn't stay hidden away forever so they had to return to the party. They managed a few more dances together before the party was over.

Things didn't change overnight but there was a very gradual change. They went found themselves alone more and more though their routine didn't change much. What did change is that Solana was giving them lots of space and she more often than not made sure that Adrian gave them their space too.

Now over the years Tali had been building up her own network of contacts and had worked a few small projects here and there. Her pet project had been in the works for a few years and had been waiting for her to reach the age of majority. After she did she launched her project in earnest, gathering up directors, special effects people, sound, filming, producers, and everything else that was necessary.

She just needed actors now. So she had coerced him into using up one of his personal days to audition for her new TV show _Mass Effect._

**A/N: I have just moved to a new country, gotten a new job and a new apartment. While everything settles down I hope you have enjoyed my stress writing. I've had this plot bunny for a while. It's nice to see it finally make it onto electrons.**


	3. Casting Call

**The Show Must Go On (Casting Call)**

She had told him to show up like he would if he was at work so there he was. Dressed in heavy combat armor sitting on a small chair in a row with other people who were also sitting on those metal folding chairs. Above him on a piece of paper taped to the wall was scrawled "C-Sec Auditions". Surprisingly there were people of every species in this line. Well at least this TV show was trying to be liberal. Maybe he'd have to mention it to his father. See if the real C-Sec wouldn't want to try to do something for more proper publicity or something.

Garrus looked around at the people waiting in line with him. They were pretty. That's the only way he could describe them. They were pretty people. You could tell they were used to being on TV or in movies or whatever. They somehow didn't seem quite normal because of that.

Maybe it was his own uneasiness coming through. He was out of place here and he knew it. Not for the first time he thought about just getting up and going home but she had gushed about this opportunity she had set up for him. She'd given him a name and address and told him to be there. It really must have taken some doing because the name he had belonged to a producer. He wasn't exactly sure what the pecking order was in the TV world but he knew producers were up there.

Eventually he was passed off to some assistant who dropped him off in the line he was in now. Where he stuck out like crazy. Aside for the fact he had a face that would never pass the TV beauty standards, he was in a suit of heavy armor sporting C-Sec colors. Whereas the other people were in regular clothing.

A few people had quietly laughed at him. One had asked if this was his first audition. This garnered more polite laughs when he said yes. Apparently, he looked like he was trying too hard for a role coming all dressed up. They had complimented him on his scar make up though. Said it looked very convincing. Of course there was deathly silence after he calmly explained that his scared face was the result of a bomb blast and subsequent inferno. Since then, no one had said anything to him which suited him just fine.

After an hour of waiting it was finally his turn. He was lead around some corners and onto a stage. There he saw a gagged Adrian being held in a headlock by human who had a gun to Adrian's head.

In a flash his pistol was out and trained on Adrian's captor.

"Officer Zorah, you okay?" Garrus called out to Adrian who just nodded. In the background Garrus could see people peeking over desks. In the seats people were hunkered down as well. Off to his side he could see the human who had led him here also cowering down by the stairs of the stage. At least the civilians were out of the way and in cover. That was good in case things got ugly.

"That's far enough C-Sec." The human said.

Garrus stopped advancing only to shift to the side. Maybe he could force the guy off the stage. The fall would suck but it might buy him enough time to jump on the gunman and disarm him.

"So why are you doing this?" Garrus asked keeping his voice even. Had to keep the guy engaged and distracted.

"Why am I doing this?" came the confused reply.

"Yeah, what at your demands? There's got to be a reason." Garrus said calmly. In his field of vision he saw Adrian's eyes roll up. "Hey, hey, easy up on your grip. He's no good to you dead."

"Of course he's no good to me dead."

Behind him there were pounding of boots and what sounded like high heels on the tile floors. He heard a breathless "Garrus" gasped and instantly knew that Tali was somewhere behind him.

"I hope you brought security with you." He said over his shoulder.

"Okay, I'm really confused now." The gunman said. He moved to scratch the side of his head with his pistol and that is when Garrus sprang. He was upon him in two strides, knocking his pistol away and wrenching his arm behind his back causing him to instantly give out a cry of pain. A quick strike to the back of the knees put the gunman on the ground and not long after Garrus was slamming his torso flat to the ground and slapping on hand cuffs.

There was a smattering of weak applause from the audience area and a bewildered "What's going on?" from the gunman. Garrus finally spared a moment to glace at Tali who didn't look happy as she stomped up to him. Beyond her he could see two security guards. Both were snickering. He glanced over his other shoulder to check on Adrian who had ungagged himself and was now howling in laughter. At least by the time Tali made it up to him he had the decency to start uncuffing the guy.

"You were supposed to read the lines that Terry was supposed to have given you and you were supposed to use a prop gun, not your real one." Tali said in a clipped tone. This was very embarrassing clearly but it was overly so for her. She may have let it slip he was coming to the quarian crew who spread the message through the rest of the organization. That is why when he drew his weapon the casting people had instantly sent her a message. She was mad at him and mad at her staff and mad at herself that this had come to pass.

"Well I'm not apologizing. My actions were in line with C-Sec regulations in regards to hostile actions against C-Sec officers. Besides, a little heads up would have been in order." Garrus replied in an equally terse tone.

"It was all on your call sheet that, like I said Terry was supposed to give you. Normally people wait for instructions before flying off the handle."

Terry at this point meekly came forward and gave Garrus a very crumpled piece of paper. It was evident that the paper had been scrunched up in Terry's fright from earlier.

Garrus took it and hauled the gunman up to his feet. "Really thought I was convincing?" the guy asked. Garrus shot him a quick look. The man was smiling and seemed to be taking things stride. Garrus just found it odd that being a convincing gunman seemed to override the fact that he could have been shot.

Garrus read over the script. Simple scene where the potential actor was supposed to talk to the gunman and intimidate him into letting the hostage go immediately following a bloody shootout. Later he would find out that the prop guns were to add to the scene. Something about realism. Which he found ironic because when he had pulled his very real weapon almost everyone hit the deck. The only reason gunman didn't was because he hadn't seen that Terry hadn't given Garrus the prop gun.

" 'Now I know what you're thinking. Did he fire 8 shots or 9? Truth be told that in excitement I lost track. Being that this is a Carnifex X, one of the most powerful handguns in the galaxy, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?'" Garrus read out loud dead pan. "Isn't that from _Blasto 1_?"

And that was the end of his audition. He'd done as she asked and it had ended in spectacular disaster. He spent the rest of his day off plotting misery for Adrian. The punk had to have known since was part of the proceedings and he hadn't tipped him off.

A few weeks went by and Garrus put the incident behind him. He kept busy with work. He had a few dinners with Tali. He apologized. He didn't want to and felt he really shouldn't have to but he had learned something over his years in the verse. It was always better to just apologize when it came to the trivial things.

So imagine his surprise when Tali told him he had a call back. And that he wouldn't have to use up a personal day because she had convinced Executor Vakarian that it would be good exposure for C-Sec if someone actually from C-Sec got a TV part for once. Garrus just nodded and continued to eat his dinner.

The call back wasn't anywhere near as dramatic as his first audition had been. He read his lines, did the scene, told the people evaluating him that the lines were terrible and left.

It wasn't that he was disinterested in Tali's project. She'd tell him her ideas for the show and asked for some input here and there. It was all very fun and exciting, building up a world from scratch. Well not completely scratch, more like a twisted reality.

Krogan were going to mean and aggressive in the ME verse, who bred like bunnies but were made sterile by salarians. Salarians were being portrayed as super scientists and asari were the diplomats, a switch of reality. Turians were being played straight if a bit more militantly. Quarians were being portrayed as a tragic species, having lost their homeworld to a robot rebellion. Humans were going to be "new comers" to space and have rocky relations with just about everyone. In reality it was hard to hate humans, they just got along well with everyone.

The main cast was to be an ensemble on a ship that went around the galaxy having adventures. The main lead was still up in the air but Tali was leaning towards a human. They were the most neutral politically and more audiences would accept a human lead. There was a part for a quarian, a turian, a krogan, an asari and two more humans in the main cast. Things were still a little too sour with salarians to have one on the main cast in light of the upheaval a few years ago.

The plot was that the human lead would be made part of a super elite group of agents that answered directly to the all powerful Citadel Council. Garrus had laughed at this. The idea of the Citadel Council wielding galactic wide power was downright funny. All they did now was govern the Citadel itself and decided what color of tinsel to hang on holidays. But it fit the story well. It gave the lead character the established means to do just about anything they wanted to. This of course made it easier for the writers to do whatever they wanted to. One of these super agents would go rogue and there would be wacky adventures climaxing with a battle at and on the Citadel.

Of course things looking good on paper doesn't mean it's good in reality. No big names wanted to be associated with something as bold as what Tali was trying to put together. So it was cast of no name acting hopefuls. Few had any previous acting experience. Those few were the amongst the ones that made it to call backs. A few others were there because of deals Tali had made or because they knew someone or because they were at least the most enthusiastic.

And there were other issues. Like how to hide any quarians face from the cameras in a natural and organic way. Masks were cliché and more a theatre thing away. Really thick veils might work but then how would the actor be able to see anything? Eventually Tali's writing staff settled on stealing from the volus. Weak immune systems and environmental suits. They spun up some pressure related thing for the volus instead. That way they kept the possibility of the quarian being a romantic interest open but kept their face properly hidden.

On top of being multi species Tali was making her show have audience interaction. Episodes were supposed to end on cliffhangers and the audience would have two choices on which way things could go. It wasn't a new idea in TV. Garrus could remember shows doing that when he was a child. However the practice had fallen out of favor because it took some creative control away from writers and creators.

Still, that's what she wanted to do and no one could tell her no. She was after all the big boss. As creator, executive producer and more importantly main financer of this little project. When Garrus found that out he was reminded of just how fabulously wealthy the Zorahs were. Most people just wrote fan fiction. Tali did live action screen plays with the budget of a small planet. Oh course he never said anything of that effect to her. He merely mentioned that a show with audience input hadn't been on the air in over 30 years.

He did, however, have a few words to say when she informed him that he had been chosen as the main turian actor for the cast. He had a job after all. One he wasn't due to retire from for at least another 13 years at the earliest. Now was not the time for a career change. He'd done her little fun and games by showing up and embarrassing himself but he wasn't changing careers for her. She insisted he didn't have to give up his C-Sec job. That he could do this on the side. He pointed out that he only got a few days off for every 30 days of work. He'd blow through all of his personal days real fast. Plus, he did need time off to decompress so he wasn't going to give up all of his weekends for the foreseeable to do this little show of hers.

Tali, being Tali, merely took what he had to say and then found a way around all of his objections. Now she had approached C-Sec early on for her project. She wanted to use a few actual C-Sec locations for shooting. It would be cheaper than building those sets and C-Sec people could be in the background thus saving her on background actors for those scenes. In return she was willing to shine a good light on C-Sec.

She went back to the C-Sec PR department and suggested that perhaps a few C-Sec people might be given actual speaking roles. Nothing too large or fancy but still spoken lines on TV. All she needed was a little leeway with a certain detective who was up for a major supporting role.

Oh she knew he wasn't going to be happy with her. In fact after that he didn't speak to her for two weeks unless it was absolutely necessary. He even skipped out on their usual weekly dinner. But he showed up when he was supposed to. He was after all turian and did what he was ordered to do. Even if he fought those orders all the way up to the Executor himself. He had even stormed into his father's office with his orders clutched in his talons and slammed them on his desk. His father didn't even look up. He just told his son that it would be good PR for C-Sec and that he should work on his relationship problems at home.

And so that's how things were between them during the first few weeks of production. It got him a few odd looks and questions when he met the other members of the cast. A few of them had the good sense to not pursue that line of questioning or even not ask about it all together.

Like Reginald "Wrex" Urdnot. A huge old scarred up krogan with a very strange name. The exotic pet rehabilitator by trade, Wrex went by Reginald because it sounded much more high class which were his main clientele . Garrus had actually met him a few times before. Sometimes cases of murder as just as simple as an exotic pet killing their owner. And sometimes eating them. And Wrex's Animal Rehabilitation was the place to go. Wrex was to play the part of a tough krogan mercenary. He certainly looked the part once make up got done with him. It was nice though, knowing someone on the cast. They were by far the old men of the cast. The "kids" were all in their 20's.

Well at least comparatively. There was an asari Maiden that had made the cast. Her older half sister had made her come to the audition with her and slipped away at the last moment. Of course the casting agents didn't care. Liara played the part of a young and innocent girl way out of her depth perfectly. Maybe because she was one. At just 106 Liara was wandering rather aimlessly through life. She'd just finished off her second PhD and was between projects to give her direction. Still she was a cheerful if shy girl from what Garrus could tell.

Someone that did engage in conversation was the main lead. A redheaded ball of spunk named as Johanna but preferred to go by Jane who never seemed to run out of questions. She had been on the Citadel a few years having come there from some far off human colony to make it big in the entertainment industry. She'd acted in a few other projects before. A few commercials here and there. _Mass Effect_ was to be her big break and she was really enthusiastic about it. And she seemed to think that Garrus was some sort of expert on all this TV magic. Him telling her that he wasn't didn't stem the flow of questions, it mere redirected them towards other areas. Like his part and why there were rumors that he was fighting with the executive producer and was that a smart thing to do and were they a couple cause up until a few weeks ago...

The other two human cast members were mercifully less wordy. Kaiden was a quiet and respectful young man and Ashley was very much the same except a girl. Which had confused Garrus for a bit because the only Ashley's he had ever met were men.

There were others he met. A veteran turian actor was to play the bad guy of the series. Clearly his glory days were over if he was working on such an experimental show. A fading human star had been hired to be Jane's mentor, both on and off screen. There was an up and coming comedian who was to be the ship's pilot. Garrus was sure that the doctor of the crew was an old theatre actress. And the list went on like that. It wasn't the finest cast that money could buy but it would have to do.

Still, if he was honest with himself the show might last a few episodes before it went off the air. The writing staff was supposed to be good. And they were, he recognized a few names from different shows he'd seen. They were just unbelievably lazy when it came to character names.

Just about everyone's character had the same first name as they did in real life with a few exceptions. Johanna was Jane and Natalia was Tali. Yes, Tali had given herself the quarian role. Who was going to stop her? No one and that was part of the issue between them.

In the back of his head he knew that Tali came from money and got whatever she wanted. As far as he knew, she was rarely told "no" and in those rare cases always managed to find a way to get what she wanted anyway. She was just always so level headed and grounded that he never thought she would have gone over his head like she did. And he liked to believe that hadn't done it to maliciously try to ruin his career at C-Sec. She did it because she really wanted him in what was basically gloried fan fiction of _Fleet and Flotilla_.

As Jane had so kindly informed him, there were rumors circulating in the rumor mill that was the _Mass Effect_ cast and crew. The wiser folks never said anything and the less wise at least had the good grace to say it behind his back. And Jane took it upon herself to tell him every variation of each rumor. One even involved unicorns somehow. He wasn't exactly sure. Sometimes he tuned her out, other times he just turned off his hearing aids all together. Of course he never told anyone about his particular condition but these things have a way of getting out.

He had a bad habit of leaving his hearing aid in at night and thus didn't charge them up as often as he should. About a month into his silent treatment of Tali the batteries went dead in his hearing aids while he was on set. He tried to hide the fact that he couldn't hear anything and did alright for a few scenes. He knew how to keep his voice steady, and more importantly how to read lips. At least on turians and quarians. He was still working on his human.

But she figured him out after he was too slow on a few prompts. There were few that witnessed the actual exchange of signs between them but it didn't take a genius to figure out what was up. She scolded him and sent him home. And that is how word spread that the grizzly turian was deaf.

Tali was pissed. A month of nothing from him and when they finally do talk to each other in something that aren't lines for the show, it's in sign. And he didn't even say much. Just "Yes, my batteries are dead."

So she had scolded him, signing away furiously. He really didn't need the scolding. She knew that he knew he should be charging them every night. But it was an excuse to say something to him and so she took it. Afterwards she just felt terrible. For him and herself. She knew he disliked people knowing that he was "damaged" as he had once described himself. So she made the crew swear they would never ever mention this incident. Ever. She even went as far as to threaten to fire anyone that ever did. That might have been a bit much but it got the point across and she was angry. And that had been a way to vent that anger.

She was angry because she didn't know how to fix it. Part of the problem was she wasn't exactly sure what she was trying to fix. He had seemed okay with the idea working on the show. And when he pointed out the obvious obstacles that were prevent him from doing so she had smoothed out those bumps. It was a perfectly normal quarian reaction to a problem. Circumvent a problem rather than brute force your way through it.

And in return he had become angry with her. It had been a month of solid silence from him. No dinners, no unnecessary conversation on set, not even polite hellos if she was at the Vakarian residence when he was.

Worst of all, Solana was no help at all. Solana had long ago given her blessing as it were, for Tali to go chasing after her older brother. But she had laid down one rule and had refused to bend even a little on it. Solana was resolute to stay out of the relationship when it came to anything serious. The thing with his uniform was a prank. This certainly qualified as serious though. All Solana had done was stare at her with her eyes as wide open as they could go on a turian and told her to talk to Garrus.11

However a mad Garrus is quite an intimidating person to talk to. Tali was never afraid of him because he never gave her reason to be fearful. But she could and was intimidated by angry Garrus. So she fortified her courage with a little help of a bottle of turian brandy that Solana kept in her closet before she marched down the hall and pounded on the door of the one room she had never been in within the Vakarian residence; his.

By this point it was rather late at night. Tali had gone over to seek out Solana for help after that day's shooting was done. And after her paper work was done. And after she had screwed up her courage. So when Garrus answered his door it was well after midnight.

"I don't know how to fix this." Tali said gesturing between them. She signed it a moment later just in case he didn't have his hearing aids in. Which given the hour, he shouldn't and for once he didn't. "I don't know how to fix this because I don't know why you're mad at me."

She watched him clench and unclench his talons several times in clear anger. Vaguely in the back of her mind she registered that he wasn't wearing gloves. Or any other clothing for that matter. But she just stared at his hands. She didn't want to look at his face, to see his anger written across his face. Because she was the source of that anger and she wasn't comfortable with that.

He started to sign but then thought better of it and popped in his hearing aids.

"You don't know why I'm mad at you? Really?" His voice was strained as he tried to keep it even and not shout.

Tali cast her eyes down to her own hands that she started to ring. It was an old childish habit of hers when she was nervous or unsure and normally she would stop immediately once she noticed herself doing it. But she allowed herself that small comfort. It helped her take her mind off the fact she was standing in the doorway of Garrus' room in the middle of the night having what was looking to be a drag out fight.

"No I don't. One moment everything was fine and then the next you stopped talking to be. I don't know what I did to make you mad at me."

She didn't see his face fault but she heard him move and sit on the lip of his bed. Nest shaped, just like all turian beds.

"I'm mad because you went over my head. I'm mad because you nearly torpedoed my career. I'm mad because you wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. Damn it Natalia, you disregarded my feelings on something and violated my trust. Why shouldn't I be mad?"

She wished he had yelled or shouted or even let anger seep into his voice. It might have made her feel better. Instead he got more deadpan with each word, his tone steady and lifeless. It just made the words he spoke deepen the sickening feeling in her gut. Somewhere in his small speech she had started crying. And had slumped against the door frame and down to the floor. She hadn't meant to do any of those things and hadn't thought that her actions at the time would have that effect. But it made sense.

She knew enough about turians to know how it would look on his service record. A successful detective suddenly transferred to Public Relations. Even in the meritocracy people would wonder who he had pissed off enough to warrant was would be viewed as a punishment. But far worse than that was that she had betrayed his personal trust.

When she thought back she had allowed her excitement of the prospect of them working together to cloud her judgment. He'd been supportive but he did have another job already. An important one that he enjoyed. And he had told her no. Worse still, she hadn't respected that no.

To a quarian, accepting 'no' as an answer was seen as a failure. Nothing was impossible or off limits. The right sort of deal just had to be found. That was how the great mercantile game was played. But he wasn't quarian. He was turian.

"I'm so sorry." She sobbed. "I never meant to. I'm so sorry." It became a chant between her sobs and gasps for air. How could she fix this? Could she fix this? She had to be able to because if she couldn't, whatever they were, was over.

Garrus knelt down and wrapped his arms around her. He had been prepared for an argument, a fight even when she showed up at his door but he wasn't prepared for this. Reducing a strong woman like Tali to tears had never been his intention though he had had every right to air his grievousness. Still he was caught off guard. At a loss about what to do he held her and did his best to console her.

Once Tali registered his arms around her and heard him shushing her she threw herself into him, seeking the comfort of his embrace. In doing so she bowled him over onto the floor. He didn't make an effort to get up. She cried into his stomach while he very delicately ran his talons through her hair. She kept apologizing and he just replied that they would be okay though he didn't elaborate. They could talk about it in the morning.

Eventually her apologies slowed and the crying stopped and both were replaced with the slow even breathing of sleep. Carefully he maneuvered his way out from under her and scooped her up. It was far too early in the morning for him to take her home. Solana would have gone to bed hours ago. And putting her on the couch was a bit cold. So he placed her on one side of his bed before settling in himself.

Tali awoke the next morning very confused. She had spent countless nights at the Vakarian residence, this was the first time she woke up in a bed that didn't belong to Solana. Nor was the turian in said bed Solana. Instead Tali woke up to the sight of Garrus' back. She watched him for a little while, seeing the rise and fall of his chest with each breathe he took.

This wasn't how she had imagined her first time waking up next to him would be like. Harsh words and crying were never in her day dreams and she had all her clothes on. The only thing right in this scenario was he didn't have any clothing on. It was selfish of her, but she took advantage of the situation and just watched him a while.

He was on laying on his left side, which left her see all of his right. She knew that he had been scarred by the resulting fire from that blast so long ago. She saw the scarring on his right mandible and side of his face. She had known he had some scarring on his arm as well. But she never knew it was all of his right arm and a good portion of his torso as well. Even after all these years the scars were a dull blackish hue to contrast with his natural blue luster.

Before she realized what she was doing Tali reached out and ran her fingers down a patch of his scarred side, right down his ribs. It wasn't until she reached the bottom of the black patch that Garrus stiffened for a moment from her touch.

"Awake I take it?" came his morning greeting with a hint of humor in his voice.

Tali withdrew her hand sheepishly. "Sorry." She murmured. "And sorry again. About last night. I hadn't realized what I'd done until you told me. Still, that doesn't make it alright." Tali apologized again.

"We'll be alright." Garrus' reply eased the ball of tension that had settled into her chest. They were still them. "This doesn't mean everything is alright overnight because I'm still mad at you. Okay?"

"Okay."

"But that doesn't mean I stop caring about you Natalia. Even when I'm mad at you I will always care. Never forget that."

Tali could only nod though he couldn't see her reaction. He took her silence as acceptance though. She was busy trying to corral her emotions and didn't trust her voice to speak that moment. That was the first time either of them had mentioned feelings or attachment of any kind to each other. Odd as it may seem it made perfect sense for them. Up until 2 months ago anything out of line on his part could have gotten him in trouble. And just because they had crossed that magical legal barrier didn't mean everything just flew into top gear. Their relationship was a slow one after all. Glacial would have been described as a speed boost.

"Is your veil in place. I'd really like to turn around and hug you."

Tali quickly checked and straightened her veil. Thankfully her hair style made removing it rather difficult so it stayed in place even during her slumber. She briefly thought of being bold and removing it but thought better of it. Last night her appearing at his door had been a huge breach of their usual protocol with each other. Their spat and the fallout from it didn't need anything else heaped on top of it.

"I'm decent."

"Good." Garrus rolled over and smiled at her before pulling her into a tight hug. "Sorry for making you cry last night."

Tali felt more than heard him speak as she tucked herself into his chest. This was more in line with her daydreams. "It was fair." Was all she offered. He was the wronged party in this after all.

"No, that doesn't mean I get to make you cry. I never want you to have a reason to cry and least of all want to be that reason."

Tali didn't reply and just listened to this breathing. All things considered, it wasn't a terrible way to spend her early morning.

**A/N:** **So I know you guys are going to get these all at once but still, sorry about the long delay. Like I said last chapter, lots of new things in my life. And part of that is being broke having to buy everything for my new place. And being broken enough that I had to choose between the Internet and being able to eat this last month. You can see which one won. But look at the really long chapters you got!**


	4. The Series has landed

**The Show Must Go On (The Series had landed!)**

"You slept with him?!"

Tali didn't even look up from the paper work she was going through.

"Adrian, who I sleep with is none of your business." That earned her a sputtered series of sounds that might have been words. At the very least it got Tali to look up at her younger brother who had what she could only describe as a confused expression on his face. She was pretty sure he was confused as to what the proper response he was supposed to give.

And she was sympathetic to his plight. Pretty much universally across all the species it would have been clear cut had she been the younger sibling and he the older. Older brothers protected younger sisters. They beat up and chased away boyfriends and always pretended their little sisters were innocent up until they got married. And little sisters weeded out bad girlfriends to make sure their older brothers weren't dating a crazy girl. At least that is what Tali thought things were like for older brothers and younger sisters.

With them it wasn't so clear cut. Tali was the older one, the one that had to forge the path first in their family while Adrian followed. It made her more independent, more outgoing and more capable. Still, Adrian was a man and even though gender had nothing to do with one's ability to do anything, it was hard to turn off that primal part of the brain that told him he should be protecting his sister. From what exactly, Tali certainly didn't know and she suspected her brother didn't either.

"If it will make you feel better you could go beat him up. He's supposed to come get me for dinner in about 10 minutes." That earned her another sputtering of noises to which she just rolled her eyes and went back to her paperwork.

It was an amusing thought even if Adrian would never do such a thing. She knew that he practically worshipped Garrus. Their father wasn't home much and when he was he was often in his office busy working. So during his formative years, a still ongoing process mind you, Garrus had appeared and served as a male role model. Hell, Tali knew that the reason Adrian had gone into C-Sec was entirely because of Garrus. Add in the fact that Garrus had taken Adrian under his wing at work. So Garrus was his boss, his friend, his mentor and a seasoned military veteran who knew way more fighting styles than what was taught at C-Sec. Yeah, any fight between Garrus and Adrian would be hopelessly one sided.

"He's my boss sis. Besides he'd kick my butt and we both know that. It's just. I don't know. I feel like I should be doing something about this."

"No you shouldn't. It's sweet, Adrian, really. But your sister is a big girl and can sleep with whoever she wants to. Just like you're a big boy and can sleep with whoever you want to. Now dating on the other hand... You sure you don't want me to set you up? I've seen the last few you dated."

"Okay fine. And no, I can get my own dates. Even if they don't meet your standards."

"I meddle because I care brother dearest."

"Love you too sis. Well I'm going to not go kick his ass and go find myself a date that you will disapprove of for the premiere. Oh hi, Garrus. Bye Garrus."

"Adrian." Garrus said in way of hello and goodbye before walking over and giving Tali a peck on the cheek. She tried very hard not to blush. It was how he greeted her now and she found it very sweet of him. "Whose ass was he not going to kick?"

"Oh yours. He finally found out that I spent a night in your bed."

Garrus laughed. "That was over two months ago."

"Solana must have been bored. You know she likes to tease him about us." Tali responded. There were three people that know that Tali had slept in Garrus' bed. Tali, Garrus and Solana because Tali told her everything. They were practically sisters and had treated each other as such for as long as Tali could remember. This of course meant that Solana knew about everything that happened between Garrus and Tali while poor Adrian was kept out of the loop as it were. So Solana had taken it upon herself to fill in the poor boy. Just usually not in a timely manner. Instead she saved information to drop on Adrian for when she was bored and wanted a good distraction. Tali always told her his reactions after all.

"All done?" Garrus asked as he watched her tidy up her desk.

"Where are we going?" Tali asked as she gathered up the last of her things and put them in her purse.

"I found a new place up on the Presidium. Does all sorts of fusion food."

"Sounds like fun."

Things were going well in her life. They had managed to move forwards, he wasn't actively mad at her anymore, and their mutual life had resumed its course. They spent time together, had their usual dinners and a sprinkling of outings that she tentatively labeled 'dates'. More importantly they talked with each other on set. She had been right, she deeply enjoyed the time she got to spend working with him. Performance arts might have taken him out of his depth but he adapted well and gave good performances. He even offered suggestions on how action scenes could be redone to be more realistic or more dramatic.

Of course there was a collective sigh of relief when they started talking to each other on set. There had been considerable tension amongst different groups for different reasons. The crew held Garrus up in some regard because of the quarians telling his story. And at the same time Tali was the big boss. So everyone just walked on egg shells whenever they had been remotely close to each other or when they shared a scene.

The cast didn't like the tension between the two off camera. On camera they managed to make it work and the writers limited their interaction. It did give their characters a great undercurrent between them. Off camera the cast felt like they had to pick a side but then felt bad about whoever they picked.

So when they showed up to work together talking with each other there was great rejoicing. Actually there was a great collecting of winnings by Liara. The shy Maiden was quick to explain that a betting pool on when they would make up had started and she picked the correct date. Only after having been coerced into partaking by the other cast members. Liara had been so embarrassed about the whole thing that she gave the money to Tali and Garrus. Her reasoning was that the others shouldn't have made a wager in the first place so they deserved to lose their money. And since Garrus and Tali were the subject of the bet, they should get the money. Tali turned around and used the winnings to get extra snacks for everyone that day.

Making a TV show was a slow process. Especially one as detailed and massive in scope as what Tali had put together. In 4 months of being an official production, they had shot only 3 episodes. A lot of the first few weeks was handling the legal portion. Tali had created a company to handle all of this and keep it separate from everything she managed or owned. Then there was hiring a director willing to do the project and who shared her vision. Same with producers, and writers, and crew. Then came the great casting call and weeding down the many hopefuls to the select few that made up the main cast. Then there was support actors to be hired. And extras. And all of that took money and a mountain of paperwork written in legalese.

Then there was trying to get any station to give them a time slot to air their pilot episode. A time slot that wasn't doomed to failure. Tali had had to sacrifice her idea of having audience interaction with her work. No network was willing to touch _Mass Effect_ if that was to be in every episode. Even then she also had to rebrand the series into something of a made for TV movie and a regular TV show to get sponsorships and ads to help fund it. She could have just made her own TV network but she didn't have the money for that.

She hadn't told anyone but if the pilot wasn't a hit, that was it. She'd spent all 10 million credits of her birthday money on making the three episodes they had made. If she had been stingier maybe they could have made a fourth episode but she wanted to have solid production values to help sell the show.

The premiere Adrian spoke of was the premiere of the pilot episode. She'd finally managed a favorable deal with a network that actually gave _Mass Effect_ a chance. She'd spent the last of her money on advertisement for the show once they had a solid air date. It was a bit silly but a lot of the cast and crew were going to meet at a TV theatre for the big night.

TV theatres were just what you would think them to be. A movie theatre style screen that played a feed of a certain channel all day long. They were very popular for sporting events in particular and did serve food and drink. Tali had booked one for the occasion and had invited the press to come join them.

Everyone was excited and in a good mood on premiere night. Everyone was dressed up and had brought friends and family to join them. The place was packed. Even a few media outlets showed up, though it was junior reporters who had been sent to field this story. The only reporter of note was Emily Song, a friend of Garrus'. Still Tali was optimistic. Some paparazzi had even showed up. The cast was in costume and had posed for some photos. Tali just hoped those were the photos that would be used in tomorrow's articles.

She didn't watch the showing herself. She spent those two hours watching people watch it. She'd seen it already, having the final say on what cut they broadcasted. She felt good about it though. It certainly looked nice even if it was an old story being told. Heroes racing against time to stop a madman from ushering the end of all life as they knew it. Who hadn't told that story before? But Tali was sure that their telling of it would be interesting enough to be picked up more permanently by a network.

Solana was there of course and dressed to kill. She was wearing a short cocktail dress that Tali knew that Garrus hated seeing his sister in. Usually because it showed off all of her and meant she attracted a few suitors. And he usually ended up having to chat with them after Solana grew bored with the flavor of the month.

Adrian was dressed in his C-Sec dress uniform. He had finer made suits at home but he was very proud of his association with Citadel Security. And girls did like men in uniform. He was right though. Tali definitely did not approve of his date. She was had a bit of a reputation of chasing only rich men and rumor had it she was even willing to get knocked up to catch one. Tali would have to warn her brother sometime during the evening.

Cast members had invited some family. Jane was the exception having no family to invite. Instead she had been abducted by Liara and her family for the evening. Liara's very regal looking parents were both Matriarchs of some standing who had been together almost 500 years. Liara's older sister was a Matron who was rather heavy with child at the moment. Her hanar bond-mate wasn't able to attend on account of an emergency at work.

Kaiden had a sister show up as well as a young man. Tali wanted to say it was his boyfriend but she wasn't sure. Ashley's three brothers all showed up with their wives as did a lovely young lady that spent most of the night at Ashley's side. Lastly Wrex had brought a nephew who he kept calling Runt. Tali wasn't sure if that was his given name or a nickname bestowed upon him by the old krogan. Either way the kid was shy and polite and put up with Wrex bragging that Runt had won some big krogan competition. Maw riding Tali thought it was.

Oh course there were Garrus and herself. They arrived as a couple, him dressed up in C-Sec armor and her in the environmental suit she wore for the show. The final suit was a bit embarrassing. Because they were shooting for a Teen rating but still wanted to sexualize the character, Tali's suit had extra padding in the thighs, hips and rear. This gave her a very pronounced lower portion of her body. Apparently, big breasts scared the ratings board something fierce but blowing up the lower half of a woman was just fine. At least they made it look natural. Her height helped with that a lot. And she could hide behind that face mask all day, negating the need for makeup.

Garrus on the other hand, had on more make up then she'd ever seen on a person but it did a great job of hiding his scars. She could only tell he had scars because she was right next to him and knew what to look for. Garrus had been very pragmatic about the makeup. For the episodes they had digitally touched him up where needed and had otherwise shot him on his good side as often as possible. For the premiere he had wanted to match what his character looked like and had spent over an hour in the makeup chair to achieve that end. After all, TV was for pretty people and if he was going to be on TV he had to play the part. No one ever said anything during the premiere or after it at the after party. Except Emily Song, to rib her friend a little.

People seemed to enjoy the screening. But it was a largely bias crowd. Tomorrow evening she'd get to see the reviews and the rating numbers and know if her first business venture as an adult was a success or failure.

The after party did do a good job of taking her mind off of that. After the screening Tali had enlisted Solana's help in getting out of the hot suit that was her costume, and changed into a nice evening gown for the party. It was strapless but that was all the more indecent Tali was willing to go. And besides, her dress clung in all the right places and showed off enough to be appealing without giving away everything. Unlike Solana's outfit. But Solana was a much more outgoing girl who was trying to attract some attention. Tali already had someone's attention and didn't need to do much to peak his interest. Besides, giving him something to look forward to could be a very powerful tool as well.

And he did notice right away. "You should have told me you were going to change. I would have brought a change as well."

"I like seeing you dressed up like this. All geared up and ready to take on the world." Tali cooed as she settled easily into his side, his arm firmly around her waist. "Come on, we should mingle."

Garrus groaned but let himself be steered towards a small clump of people. He hated mingling at fancy parties because of how impersonal it all was. But if he did the mingling thing he might get her to do a few more energetic or challenging dances with him that evening. She didn't like to show off just how good a dancer she was if she wasn't on a stage and he just loved doing exactly that.

It was a good party. Garrus danced a few times with his sister to cheer her up after she hadn't caught anyone that evening. Even Adrian danced with her once to help cheer her up. Tali danced with her brother as well as with a few other people. Practically the entire cast shared a dance with each other. And of course there was the informal dancing as well. And that is when everyone found out that Jane couldn't really dance. At all. And that having a mosh pit with a pair of krogan is not recommended. No bones were broken, no one concussed and everyone had a good time. All in all, it was a good party.

Tali and Garrus were among the first to leave. It was a bit early yet, only 11 pm but social rules were social rules. It would be rude to leave before the boss and Tali was the boss. While she had tried to at least learn everyone's first names, she didn't know who were married or had kids or what their day to day lives were like. So she left at a respectable hour so that others could do the same.

"Headed home?" Garrus asked.

"Yes. Carry to escort me?" Tali asked even though she knew he was going to anyway.

"It would be my pleasure." Garrus offered her his arm which she took and they set off at a very leisurely pace. "Could I tempt you with an alternate destination?"

"Perhaps."

"What about my place?"

"I don't know. Solana said she was going to try to fish some guy out at the after after party."

"What about _my_ place?" Garrus asked again.

"Oh." Tali stopped making the turian beside her stop as well. She hadn't been in his room since that night. Not that she was afraid to go so she'd have some good memories of his room but she was unsure of just what he was proposing. To date, their physical relationship consisted of one kiss that she stole when she was 15, the kiss he gave her for her 22nd birthday, hand holding on 89 occasions, and 16 kisses on the cheek. Not that she kept track.

"I actually said that out loud didn't I? You know what, forget I said that. I've had"

"Okay." Tali cut him off. "_Your_ place." She emphasized. She wasn't still wasn't sure what was in store for her there but she wasn't going to pass up this opportunity. She trusted him and knew he would stop at whatever boundary she put in place. And she knew that the cast and crew and a good chunk of her social net work actually, thought she was sleeping with the rugged turian. Would it be so bad if she actually did?

Given how often was at the Vakarian residence Tali actually had a decent sized wardrobe in Solana's closet. She slipped out of her evening gown and hopped in the shower quickly before slipping on her nightie. It was white, a nice neutral color with no extra meaning attached to it. Which was good because not knowing what this evening had in store for her, Tali didn't want to jinx it one way or the other. She did up her hair in a loose braid, the tip of it touching the small of her back. And then she debated what to do with her veil. Was it too forward to not wear it? Should she just bring it with so she could wear it in the morning?

She ended up wearing it. Her reasoning was in case she ran into Executor or Mrs. Vakarian in the middle of the night she should have it on. Never mind their rooms were on the other side of the residence and they had no reason to be on this side of the residence at this time at night. She found that he had left his door ajar so she could get in.

She closed the door behind her and paused there a moment to gather herself. He sat up and put away the data padd he was reading. Then he lifted the blanket in open invitation and Tali quickly turned off the lights to stop him from seeing her blush. But she did crawl into his bed with him, and after taking off her veil, she settled into his side.

And so they spent a completely innocent night together, only this time very much in each other's company. Well not completely innocent as Tali did ask if she could kiss him. Garrus had nearly been asleep when she asked but had replied that she didn't need to ask permission for every little thing. So she kissed him good night. And the next morning as well. She didn't ask him, but she had waited until he was awake. And had stopped, mere millimeters from his lips to search his eyes for permission. He'd let out a playful growl before closing the distance between them.

Part of how she was making up for her blunder was to always make sure she asked Garrus about anything that involved him. At first he put up with it, then he tolerated it, and now she could tell it was starting to irritate him a little. However, she never wanted to hurt him like that again, so she had spent the last two months asking permission of him when he was involved. Provided it was his decision of course.

The day after the premiere was a quiet one. At Garrus' suggestion the cast was getting together to go fishing. There was a quiet place on the Presidium that had a fishing pond and a small lazy river that went in a loop. The whole thing was enclosed and had pictures of scenic wild lands projected on the walls. Best of all, it was the only none technology zone on all of the Citadel. Everyone had to leave their pagers, cell phones, omnitools, even watches at the desk. The most advanced thing anyone was allowed was their fishing pole. The attendants would come and get someone once their allotted time was up or if they had an emergency phone call. Otherwise it was peaceful tranquility.

Only Jane and Liara showed up to meet Tali at first. Liara had never even known this place existed and Jane had never been fishing before. At least fishing in a manner that involved rod and reel. On the mining colony where she grew up, fishing involved explosives. Which left Tali as their "expert" fisherman. She at least knew what to do and was competent enough that none of the attendants came over to help. Coming fishing wasn't her favorite thing to do but Garrus really enjoyed it and she did have fun when she caught something. So they had spent a few evenings here and thus Tali had a general understanding of what to do.

Liara and Jane were good if varied students. Liara was so apologetic and slow about putting the worm on the hook. Jane was much more aggressive and after skewering her own worm, did the same with Liara's. After that they did a few practice casts. It took a few tries but they managed to get their baits sufficiently far enough away from the edge of the pond. Eventually.

"And so we wait?" Asked Jane.

"We can talk." Tali replied.

"Other activities that accompany fishing include listening to music, reading, and drinking." Liara supplied earning herself surprised looks from the other two women. "I did a little research this morning."

"Well, drinking is always fun."

"Jane, it's 9 am. And didn't you have enough last night? I seem to remember you being a little tipsy and groping a certain someone." Tali watched Liara flush a deep purple while Jane just laughed.

"I'm biotic, remember? Fast metabolism. But fine, no drinking. And how can we read if they took our omnitools?"

"You could get a book from the library." Liara suggested. "They have a fine selection and the insurance fee is modest enough." A book, a real solid made of paper book, still existed in this day and age and were available to the public like Liara said. You just had to pay an insurance fee to make sure you returned to book and to cover any damages that might incur while it was on loan. Most people that had books were the rich. In a world where data storage was near infinite, storing and displaying data in such an ancient and inefficient manner was a way to show off.

"I think I will stick to the talking option." Jane said. "So, Tali. You and tall, brooding and handsome left early last night. Run off for a little fun did you?"

"I uh..." Tali looked over at Liara. For what she wasn't sure. Help? Support? Something. But the asari looked just as shocked at Jane's forwardness.

"Oh come on. You look really happy this morning and are practically glowing."

"Maybe I'm just confident in how we will do in the ratings."

"Nope. That's why we're here remember? So we have no idea and won't know until we leave. So how many times you do it?"

"Jane really, that's quite enough. Tali is our boss"

"And our friend and you pester your friends with all sorts of embarrassing topics of discussion. That's how you know you are friends." Jane told Liara though she kept her gaze on Tali.

Tali knew about the rumors of course. It wasn't a far leap after all and sex was a perfectly normal and healthy activity. Humans just liked to gossip about it. Even more than asari did. And Tali was fairly sure Garrus wouldn't mind if she told them. Boys bragged to each other about this sort of thing, so why couldn't girls do the same.

"Twice. Last night and this morning." Is all Tali offered though Jane whooped and Liara let out a quiet "oh my." It was followed up by a louder and much more surprised "oh my" as Liara's bobber went under.

Liara set the hook like Tali had told her to and was very methodical in reeling in the fish. It turned out to be a rather small fish and though Tali didn't need it, she still netted the little pan fish. Jane had gone and fetched an attendant to take a picture of Liara's first fish. Jane was also brave enough to unhook and release the creature back into the pond.

Once all of them had recast their baits their conversation picked up again.

"So Liara, get an numbers last night or leave with anyone?"

"What? No! It would have been highly inappropriate to leave with someone. Especially with both Mother and Father there."

"What about you Jane? Grope anyone else last night?" Tali asked, rescuing Liara from Jane's attentions.

"Yes actually. The after after party was great. Met this turian chick. Great legs."

"Oh ancestors please tell me she wasn't in a short cocktail dress and had blue facial markings and light brown plumage."

"Yeah that's her. How do you know all that?"

"Did she say she was a dancer and was her name Solana?"

Jane nodded and Tali face palmed. There weren't that many turians at the event last night and of those few, even fewer were female. And Solana was the only one that Tali would have described as having "great legs" as Jane had to eloquently put it.

"I'm guessing that she knows the turian in question." Liara suggested to Jane who looked slightly worried.

"She's Garrus' kid sister. And my sister. We grew up together." Tali said in way of explanation. "Look, it's fine you're both adults and all that. It's just that Solana isn't sure of herself right now and hasn't told anyone else that she's sampling the other team as it were. So you can absolutely not tell Garrus. It's not anyone's place but hers to do that. Got it?"

"Okay okay. I got it. Geez you don't have to go all big sister on me." The look from Liara earned a defensive "I didn't know" from the human redhead. "If she is Garrus' sister, and your 'sister' then wouldn't you sleeping with Garrus mean you are sleeping with your 'brother'?

That sparked off a very awkward discussion of just how closely related people were allowed to be in their various species which mercifully segwayed into genetics in general. That found its way to animals and then fish and fishing.

Wrex showed up with Runt in tow and the two krogan convinced the girls that they should move onto the intermediate area which was lure fishing in a different section of the pond. They had better luck there, actually managing to catch a few fish worth keeping. They handed the fish over to an attendant who saw to it that their catch was part of their noon time meal. Kaiden and Ashley joined them after lunch and the group spent the remainder of the day fishing in various groups. It was a good bonding experience and it kept them all sufficiently distracted.

Someone who was also sufficiently distracted was Garrus. He had work that day which suited him just fine. Bad guys weren't just going to turn themselves in after all. He kept busy that day looking into a robbery that had gone wrong and turned into a double murder. It was fairly cut and dry and it was really a matter of building up a proper case against the guy while they looked for him.

And it's not like the guys at work didn't try to elbow him a bit. It was all fair and good natured so Garrus let it slide. It was when they kept interrupting him by mentioning a new article or review they had just read that he had had to put a stop to it all. The unfortunate victim was a human detective named Jacobs whose only crime was bad timing. His punishment was to cross the room and back doing a simple exercise that turians called metal legs. The human name was iron mike. It was an easy forward lunge but it absolutely devastated the thighs of anyone who did them properly. And Garrus made sure he did them properly.

Of course the captain did wonder why one of his detectives was lunging across his bullpen, and Garrus merely explained that the detective had not been concentrating on his job and was distracting others from theirs as well, which was bad for the units productivity. A correction had to be made. And with that the captain merely told them to carry on, after doubling Jacobs punishment.

After work and on his way to pick up Tali, Garrus allowed himself to idly wonder how the reviews were. He'd been quick to cut off anyone who had tried to talk to him about it and after the Jacobs incident no one at work tried to say a thing about it. As a peace offering Garrus had promised them that tomorrow they could lay into him all they wanted.

Garrus however was gracious enough to wait until he had gathered Tali and whisked her off to the relative safety of the Vakarian residence before they sat down and started going over the reviews and ratings data that Tali had had an assistant gather up and forward to her omnitool.

Not surprisingly, the show was a smash hit.

**A/N: Good news everyone! I'm doing a visa run and thus have to stay a hotel. This means internet. Bad news everyone! I have to go back home to work. But I have uploaded everything I have written so far. It's amazing how much writing you can get done when you aren't distracted by cats and tubes.**


	5. Cast Shake Up

**The Show Must Go On (Cast Shake Up)**

The show was a smash hit. Starting the next day Tali was suddenly beyond busy. She hired a second assistant just to handle the increased volume of everything that went with the show. She had to negotiate a long term deal with the network. Then there was advertizing deals, both for the shows own awareness and for companies that wanted to be associated with what was going to be that season's must see TV. And there was renewing just about everyone's contracts because she had only hired them on for 3 months. Which meant arguing with agents who wanted more money for their clients. It was an absolute nightmare and she was just swamped with work for the next several weeks. Tali even had to miss out on her weekly dinner with Garrus because she was just too exhausted at the end of the day.

He took it in stride and was supportive throughout. He kept busy with work but found the time to see her each day, even if it was just for a few moments. Not counting the time they spent on set together of course. But they were playing support roles so most of their interaction was with Jane, rather than each other.

The show had a philosophy of rotation for the cast. Each episode a different pair would be sent off with Jane on whatever adventure the writers had come up with. And afterwards the episode would close out with Jane going around the ship and asking each character to weigh in on the recent events.

And they only managed to produce an episode every two weeks down from the episode a month they had started out with. Apparently that was slow for the TV world but they did have some serious back end production that had to be done and 2 weeks was the absolute fastest things would go.

Still Garrus for one was glad that it was 2 weeks between episodes. It meant he had to spend less time at that job and could actually do his real job. And it gave Tali more time to concentrate on the business end of her venture without having to worry about her acting role.

And so things settled into a pattern. People settled into their characters more, the cast gelled, the crew got comfortable with their duties on the show. Eventually Tali got things under control and their dinners were once more a weekly thing. And she spent more and more nights at his place following those dinners to the point it was given that she'd sleep with him at least one a week.

Tali enjoyed those nights. Dinner with him was always comfortable and they had made a game of alternating bringing interesting topics of discussion. And she looked forward to the later portion of those evenings as well. He let her take the lead on the activities that followed. There was never a caress unwanted nor a touch that was uncomfortable. While it made her feel safe, and cherished and loved, he was just so damned passive. She knew that he had had sex before. She knew that lots of people had sex and that she was the anomaly at just past 22. Hell, if Solana was anything to go by Garrus was getting laid for a few years before she was even born.

And she had made peace with that eons ago. Part of her was almost glad. It meant that he had worked out the kinks in his repertoire and she would be reaping the benefits. Granted she was glad that he wasn't pushing her for sex or crossing any boundaries, she wanted him to at least touch a boundary once in a while. His hands had a habit of just being in rather "safe" portions of her anatomy. Though even doing that he still managed to warm her up rather nicely. It made it so that when she finally escaped to her own home the next morning she had the best showers.

Of course his shower would have been closer and more convenient or even Solana's down the hall. Except that Tali knew that Solana's wasn't exactly sound proof just from her years of coming and going of the Vakarian residence. Hells, she had even held conversations with Solana while one of them was in the shower. And she wasn't going to test just how sound proof his shower was. Oh she knew that one day he'd be an active participant in making her forget her own name and thus be quite able to hear her. However, she'd very much like the first time he heard her in such a state his was doing more than being a figment of her imagination.

It didn't unnoticed by people though. Garrus and Tali's "date night" that is. Tali was usually rather chipper the morning after. Of course everyone attributed the fact that Tali was practically glowing with sated happiness to Garrus. Not that anyone said anything but they didn't not saying anything either. Jane usually had a sly grin and knowing nod for Tali on those mornings. Liara usually commented on what she wore that day. Somewhere in there the asari maiden would mention something about how happy Tali looked. Her assistants always had a smile for her too. She knew they liked the day after date night as well. Tali could be a real task master but she knew she let up a lot on those mornings.

And she had a lot to deal with of course. Alenko had a drinking problem it turned out and twice now she had managed to quietly cover things up. Or at least minimize the damage. She could do nothing about the fact he had made the entertainment news but she did manage to keep him out of jail. Instead he was doing community service visiting places in character. So it wasn't all bad.

Of course Tali would rather deal with Alenko's drunken antics any day when compared to what Jane did in her free time. Wild only began to describe the redhead. The older woman was almost always broke having partied her paycheck away. Usually that very weekend. It was almost impressive, in a twisted sort of way. She did make the sleaze reports regularly, often with a different girl on each arm. Jane's fast line life combined with the fact she was a biotic made her rather popular with the ladies. Apparently one could do very interesting things with biotic fields in the bedroom. Or so Tali had been told by one of her assistants.

That was maybe the worst part of it. Jane didn't restrict her conquests as it were to just floozies she picked up at the bars. If half of what Tali heard was true, Jane had worked her way through a considerable portion of the single ladies in the company. And all Tali could think about was Solana. Her turian sister and Jane were sort of still seeing each other. At least Tali thought so. It was hard keeping track since she didn't pry into either of their private lives. Jane was a friend, if a new one, but also an employee and did wouldn't do for the boss to poke around someone's personal life.

With Solana, Tali just worried in private. When Solana had come back from basic and started dating, Tali had voiced her own concerns and worries. This lead to one of the few falling outs the girls have ever had and since then Tali had stayed out of Solana's love life. They had of course, made peace with each other and moved on but that didn't stop Tali from feeling a little sad at the time. It was a sign of them drifting apart for Solana was forging a path Tali wasn't ready to follow.

But she did understand the need for privacy. Especially in regards to physical relations. On occasion Tali was rather happy that Solana didn't share many details about her lovers. She tended to go through them fairly quickly. And she never met any of them. At least not to her knowledge.

That did change though. And it was purely by accident. Tali was leaving Garrus' room one morning to go home to start her day. In the foyer of the front door she ran into a certain redheaded human. It was clear that Jane's clothes had been in a pile for the night and had only recently been haphazardly thrown back on. Tali's clothes were in a little better shape. She at least folded her clothes before crawling into bed with her turian.

The two redheads stared at each other uncomfortably for a moment before the sound of movement caught their attention. The Vakarian household was waking up. That was all the incentive the pair needed to put on their shoes and head out the door. At least on that day Jane didn't rib Tali quite so much. It didn't spare the quarian on subsequent mornings after but at least Jane toned it down a very little.

Unlike Jane who went all out, Tali did her best to straddle the line between being seen and getting publicity for the show and keeping her privacy. She was used to a certain lack of privacy from her younger dancing days. Being a popular dancer had earned her a fair number of admirers. Most were innocent enough. Sometimes they were parents who used her as a role model for their own kids. When she was older it was younger dancers wanting to be like her.

Of course there were the creeps as well. And the extranet was full of equally terrible people who hid behind the facelessness of the net. Of the creeps the least dangerous were the ones that just hated everything and were mad at everything. Tali always just figured they were jealous that she had a talent and the drive to develop that talent. Something she suspected those nameless masses of haters probably didn't have. The really creepy ones though were the ones that put her up on a pedestal and worshipped her. On super rare occasion it was a younger dancer who Tali could talk to and explain that she wasn't some perfect being to be idolized. But mostly it was men with way too much free time on their hands and no control over their sex drives. At least it seemed that way judging from the amount of porn that had come up when Tali had searched her own name. Granted it took her until the second page of search results to find the porn, the first page being taken up by legitimate sites that she was affiliated with. Her family dancing school, a few small business ventures, and of course the show.

At least for Tali the cameras were just a part of life. For the most part the paparazzi had figured out just how much she was willing to put up with at a given event or location. Most of the cast were still rather new to the constant barrage of flashing light and were muddling their way to finding their balance. Jane of course, made it easy to be seen and heard. As the main star of the show she drew a lot of attention when she went out. And she did a decent enough job at promoting the show that Tali didn't do that much damage control with the redheaded human. Ashley and Alenko were a lot more reclusive compared to Jane. They often were only in the entertainment magazines and papers if it was a really slow day. For them, they usually were part of some promotional event they had to be at and were going to be photographed anyway.

Which was just as well. Alenko was going to court ordered rehab in between his community service and filming. Ashley was just a very private person and kept herself out of the lime light. Much like Liara did. Tali was sure that Liara's parents had a hand in keeping their youngest from too much slander. On occasion though Liara would be one of the ones on Jane's arm so the shy academic did show up in the papers now and again.

Wrex was busy with his shop when he wasn't filming but that didn't stop him from promoting both. The krogan was rather proud to have his shop linked to the show, especially since he had cut a deal with Tali over animal handling on set. If the show needed some animal for the show, Wrex provided. If he couldn't then they had to made due without. Not because they had an exclusive deal but because if Wrex didn't have the creature in stock or couldn't get it to the Citadel than no one could. With over a century of existence on the Citadel, Wrex's Animal Rehabilitation was the best place to go to for all one's animal needs. If he didn't have it, you were just out of luck. But the krogan was a miracle worker. He had even managed to get them a very young thrasher maw for some outdoor shots. Of course there was some TV magic involved to make the tiny 10 ft beast look 10 times that size when it tried to eat Jane, Liara and Tali on that particular day.

The one person that proved as close to immune to the ravenous press was Garrus. At first Tali didn't really notice. She just glanced over the many articles that her assistants collected for her and she just assumed that Garrus got the same short blurbs they all did. But once Tali took a closer look she found that the articles mentioned that he was an actor on the show and that was it. Everyone else got a little something, their age, where they were from maybe, any previous work they might have done. Later articles discussed his role on the show and any appearances he made for publicity but Tali found it very hard to find anything of substance about her turian. So one night she asked him about it and he just laughed.

"Perk of working for C-Sec. Any personal information related to work is scrubbed from everywhere we can find it. Can't have criminals knowing where cops live after all." Garrus had told her with what passed for a turian smirk.

And he was sort of right. It was hard to find information on anyone in C-Sec but no one in C-Sec was harder to find than he was. Even his father had more information available to the public and he was the Executor. Garrus on the other hand pretty much didn't exist. Apart from a few vague notes here and there, Garrus was an nonentity from birth right up to his joining C-Sec. His heroics at the bombing were well documented but before that Garrus Leto Vakarian XXX didn't exist.

'Tradition' and 'Turian' go hand in hand and the Vakarians were pretty normal by turian standards. They had been in law enforcement since there was any law to enforce. Or so the family lore says. At the very least they have been working for the law for untold ages in the Hierarchy and ever since there was a C-Sec. Not all of them dedicate their entire lives to it like the Executor did, but most Vakarians did spend a portion of their working lives in C-Sec. When you live to be 150, a few decades isn't that long to follow tradition.

And with tradition came traditional names. Garrus' line passed down the name to the first born son and had for quite some time as was evident with Garrus. Of course given that Vakarian was also a very common surname the second name also had to be added into any searches that Tali had made. Otherwise she just got bombard with countless pages of all sort of Garrus Vakarians. In C-Sec alone there were 5 Garrus Vakarians who were no close relation to each other apart from the father son pair that she knew of. There were no less than 62 Vakarians all with varying degrees of relations to each other. At the very least they were all of the same flock or what the quarians would have called a clan.

Confused about the stark lack of anything related to her favorite male turian, Tali sought out her favorite female turian.

"Look Tali, I'm only going to tell you this because we're so close and you're dating Garrus. You're practically an honorary turian so I guess it's okay if I let you know something that turians don't tell nonturians. It goes without saying that you don't tell anyone. Not even Adrian.

So you know how every society has jobs that need to be done and that no one wants to do? We call them the Thanked. They are technically levelless citizens of the Hierarchy while they are performing that job. And before you ask I have no idea what those jobs are, Dad wouldn't tell me. I'm not sure even he knows because I tried looking myself and couldn't find anything about them. Dad just told that Garrus was a Thanked while he was in the Army. Which basically means he didn't exist. At least not in public record.

But Thanked don't exactly broadcast that they were one once. And if a turian finds out that another turian was a Thanked, then you're just supposed to say 'thank you' and carry on like you never knew. They've supposedly given up far more than most, so letting them live their lives in peace is the proper social interaction."

"You said he was in the Army?" Tali asked.

"Yeah, that's what he always says when he talks about his service days. Or Army days as he calls them. All the Vakarians go to the Army. Family tradition to serve in the MPs after all."

"Unless you're dancing."

Solana laughed. "Unless your dancing. But I'm still technically part of the Army. Special Services remember?"

Tali took the information and ran it through her head a few times after she had left the Vakarian residence that evening. For her 22nd birthday Garrus most certainly had worn a Navy Commander's dress uniform. Tali had had to look up the branch and rank afterwards. That night she only knew that he had more medals and stripes than any of the other military suitors that had shown up to the dance floor. He had also been rather distractingly handsome in that uniform.

Something about that didn't sit right with Tali. Between Garrus being in the wrong branch's uniform and the fact that he had been a Thanked, Tali felt like she had missed out on a large part of his life. Well she had, not having been born until he was 20. Maybe it was the fact that finding this sort of thing out about Garrus made her realize she might not know him as well as she thought she did. Yes that was it.

So Tali rededicated herself to learning about her Garrus. It made her feel a little bit giddy, trying to learn new things about him. Not that she didn't already know a lot about him. They had been in a sort of relationship since she was 17 after all. 5 years is a long time to get to know someone. Granted some of the more intimate things were more recent. Like the scarring on his body or the fact that he had lost all feeling in the scarred areas. He hadn't lost any functionality so he considered himself to have no lasting damage.

And he was just as stubborn as she was. That she knew. He refused to take her money on just about everything they did together. He also took his coffee plain and at room temperature. He loved fishing and the outdoors in general. When he was annoyed his right mandible would twitch just a little bit. And he could do a lot of party tricks with his talented tongue.

Now all turians had long forked tongues. All turians were quite adept at using said tongues for things that required fine motor skills. While the turians did have hands, they also have rather sharp talons on their fingertips. It's only with the rise of civilization on Palaven that clipping down talons allowed the hands to be used for what most species would assume them to be used for. But due to their fine motor skills, in combination with length and rough texture, turians were supposedly extremely gifted in pleasuring partners orally.

Not that Tali knew whether or not that was true. But that was one of the things she did get ribbed about from the female staff. Or those that were close enough to rib the boss and get away with it. Jane naturally was at the forefront of the good natured jokes. However that was par for the course. The onetime Liara chipped in though everyone shifted their attention from the young quarian to the young asari.

"Turians are really the best at that."

The giggles and light laughs all stopped as the break room's occupants stared at Liara.

"What? I can show up in the papers on Jane's arm 7 times and no one says anything but having an opinion on a matter pertaining to sex is shocking?"

Tali just sat back and laughed quietly to herself. On the plus side of things, everyone was now needling the suddenly brave Maiden. On the down side, Tali had a pretty good idea who the turian that might have introduced Liara to those wonders could be. At least if the papers could be believed.

Whatever possible complications that might add to her life in the future, Liara and Jane showing up in the papers was a good thing. They were building up towards a romance between the pair on the show and Tali liked to see that her actors got along. It helped with their onscreen chemistry after all. With Tali mentally bracing herself for whatever future catastrophe Liara and Jane might cause her, Tali never even considered that Garrus would be the one to throw a wrench into things.

She was taking a break from her usual mountains of paperwork about almost nothing, choosing to spend her time watching Garrus work on a scene. Of course she had worked with him before, having acted in scenes with him but it was a nice and relaxing change of pace to watch him. And not through a thick pane of glass whilst in a very hot environmental suit that was her "work" outfit. Tali definitely preferred the simple but smart blue business suit she had on. It made her look professional and helped with deflecting away from her young age. Never mind that she was a quarian, only the single best species at anything related to money.

And the two inch heels helped. She was already tall to begin with, at 6'2" she usually could look over just about anyone she did business with. Adding the extra two inches only added to her ability to look down at people and intimidate them. Which was handy in a business meeting. Standing up, hand spread wide as she planted on the table and loomed towards her adversary of the day, was usually enough to get the message across that they weren't going to pull one over her just because she was young. Granted it wasn't a tactic that she always used or worked, but more often than not taking that high power stance did smooth out deals rather nicely.

Of course that was all just a side effect and bonus to the real reason she wore those heels. He was 6'6" in his bare feet. 6'7" in his boots. It was entirely stupid but that one inch net gain made a world of difference to her. It was one less inch she had to haul him down when she wanted a kiss. That and she was sort of used to being the tall one. Solana was only 5'8", Jane was tall for a human at 5'10", with Liara fitting in the middle at 5'9". Hell, Executor Vakarian was only 5'6" so Tali wasn't exactly sure where Garrus found that extra foot of height.

And the two inch heels had been settled upon because anything more were murder on her back and ankles. And damn near impossible to walk in. But they did make her legs and ass look great. And she knows that he definitely noticed when she started to wear heels. She's been known to slowly walk away whilst adding an extra little swing to her hips. Usually gets half the crew distracted when she does that but that low growl coupled with an even lower subharmonic usually gets everyone right back to work real quick.

So Tali was watching Garrus work as a means of unwinding. He had made it very clear in the past she was never going to get to see him work a murder scene at his "real job". Even Adrian had stone walled her on that, one of the very few things he had successfully denied her. So Tali settled for watching him work where he couldn't tell her no. He was a good actor, for someone without any training. He took direction and criticism well all while maintaining this aura of self assuredness and calm command. The only time he ever argued back was when he would point something out as being wrong or inaccurate and then someone would have to explain why they did things that way. Usually because it looked better on TV. Garrus would then usually shrug and then things would move along.

The one area he would not just shrug at was when it came to C-Sec. It was partly out of pride and partly because it was in his job description. He was there to make sure C-Sec looked accurate and more importantly good. That was how Tali had gotten him there in the first place. And the director and producers hated him, and by proxy her, for it. Even if it was just a background bit of set dressing Garrus made sure it was correct. On the days he wasn't acting Garrus was usually making the lives of some poor assistants to one of the producers miserable.

On that day Garrus had been acting with Jane and Liara and was just wrapping up. Tali was infinitely thankful because that meant her day was over and she could have a nice quiet evening cuddled into Garrus' side. She greeted him with a warm smile as she got her customary peck on the cheek. Then she buried herself in his embrace, nettling her head under his and resting her cheek against the hard shell of his breastplate. It was firm and cool to the touch but she could feel and faintly feel that low soft rumble of his subharmonics. It was that special sound he used to show her just how happy he was. So it was a surprise to Tali when that sound abruptly stopped and changed into a much more loud and surprised noise.

Hearing a turian squawk is quite something. Hearing that squawk come from the most calm and collected turian most people knew was definitely a surprise. Tali pulled back enough to cast a surprised look at Garrus and to see where he was looking. In the back of her mind Tali was keenly aware that the cast and crew, who usually cleared out pretty quick at quitting time, was going about their clean up tasks rather slowly. However was mind was mostly preoccupied with the two turians who had walked down from the audience bleachers.

Both were young. Around her age she would guess. Maybe older. Dressed in Navy dress uniforms and both wore lieutenant ranks. One a full and a junior. The senior of the two looked rather nervous. But it was the junior one that seemed to hold Garrus' attention and to whom Tali focused hers.

And she wished that she hadn't. Oh there were other features mixed in but she knew a Vakarian when she saw one. She was sure her breathing picked up as her mind went spinning at the implications. It only got worse once the younger turian spoke.

"Hi dad."

That would be when Tali fainted in Garrus' arms. When she awoke it was on the couch in her office with a very worried Jane and Liara fussing over her. And she didn't know it at the time but _Mass Effect_ was going to do without their resident turian for a while.

**A/N: Yup still no internet as of this writing. Plus, you know, life gets in the way. I didn't quite make the 5k mark I set as a goal for this chapter but it's at a natural stopping point. Next up, we get to find out what Garrus did to be a Thanked**. **And maybe why he and Tali haven't done it yet.**


	6. Thanked

**The Show Must Go On (Thanked)**

Garrus was very glad that Tali had been in his arms when she fainted. He caught her no problem and wondered only briefly where Jane and Liara had come from so quickly. They took the quarian from his arms but didn't go far. They were shooting dirty looks at the two turians. The nervous one only seemed to get more nervous and the one who had spoken looked rather alarmed.

"Son. You got promoted." Garrus said in way of greeting.

"Yeah. Passed the Navigator's Exam last week. Was going to write but I found out my ship was coming to the Citadel. Thought it would be a nice surprise. Um. Sorry about that." The younger Vakarian gestured towards the three ladies nearby earning himself scornful looks from the two conscious ones. He had the good grace to shrink back a little.

"I take it this isn't a social call." Garrus said nodding to the nervous lieutenant.

"No. Officially he's the delivery boy but my captain thought it might be better if I came along too."

"Why does that not instill me with confidence? Lieutenant. Report!" The barked order seemed to snap the quaking lieutenant out of his nerves because he snapped to attention and spoke with a clear and steady voice.

"Lieutenant Stratos reporting, sir! The Office has requested that you be collected so that you may perform a hunt, sir! Lieutenant Vakarian and I are to escort you to the ship immediately, sir!"

"Orders." Garrus said before being handed a black envelope. He opened it and scowled. It was genuine. He had hoped that maybe one of his buddies were playing a really sick and cruel joke on him. His birthday was coming up after all. This sort of thing would be right up their twisted alley.

"I'm retired." Garrus said flatly causing both the younger turians to shift uneasily. "Let me guess, you were sent to help convince me go along and in case that didn't work, help drag me in, kicking and screaming?" Garrus leveled a gaze at his son.

"Those were our orders." The younger Vakarian said with a shrug. The older lieutenant paled a little and went back to his quiet shaking. Garrus wondered if Stratos had any idea of his resume or was just terrified of him because he was a Thanked.

"Spirits Leto." Garrus cursed. He read the orders again and cursed again. In theory he could turn down the assignment. But the bounty was triple the usual meaning the Office really wanted this guy. And Garrus had heard of him through the grapevine. Real piece of work. Galaxy be a better place without him in it.

"Alright alright. Give me a minute to say goodbye. We also have to swing by my place to pick up some things."

Garrus walked over to where Jane, Liara and Tali were. They had laid Tali out on the floor, and Liara had offered up her lap as a pillow while Jane had hovered protectively.

"Look, tell her I'm sorry I'm leaving on such short notice. Tell her... Tell her I'm going fishing. Exclusive offer. Limited time sort of thing. Tell her it's that noodling thing we read about."

Liara just stared at Garrus with wide eyes. Jane mirrored her only she managed to blink. The pair watched Garrus go marching off with the two other turians in tow. Off the edge of the stage they both heard something that chilled their bones and completely shifted how they viewed the big softy of a homicide detective.

-0-0-0-0-0-0-

Garrus lead the two lieutenants off the sound stage. He had just gotten done telling Stratos why they had been sent to get him and Garrus was sure that the poor man was shaking even more. For all the stories about turian nerves of steel under pressure Stratos was a fine reminder that the overwhelming vast majority of turians weren't in combat arms. And thus expected to have those fabled nerves of steals.

Garrus turned his thoughts to the other turian walking with him. Leto. Or more accurately Garrus Leto Vakarian XXXI. But given the long life span of a turian, the family had long ago decided to alternate names as it were. It lessened confusion at larger family functions. So there was his grandfather Garrus, his father Leto, him Garrus, and his son Leto.

"So. Was that her?" Leto asked.

"Yeah."

"I take it she didn't know about me?"

"Yeah" Came the uneasy reply. Tali turning 22 didn't magically mean everything was alright in his crazy life. Garrus still had a huge load of baggage he had to slowly work through with her. Plus whatever she brought to the table as well. Part of that being that he had a son. Who was older than she was.

"She looked a bit on the young side. Tall though."

"You're a year older." Garrus said answering his son's indirect question.

That caused the younger Vakarian to actually stop walking for a moment before he lengthened his stride to catch up.

"Wow, okay then."

Garrus only grunted in reply. There was a heavy silence that settle amongst the group. They made it to the Vakarian residence where he went to his room and put a few things into a duffle bag. And grabbed his rifle case he kept in the back corner of his closet. He paused a moment and wondered if he should clear part of his closet out. Give her some room to put some things so she didn't run off in the mornings so early. But that unbidden thought was quickly banished. He would have so much damage control to do once he got back, he'd be lucky if she was there at all.

He sent off a quick message to his father explaining that duty called and that is why he wasn't at work at C-Sec. His dad would let his captain know and everything would be taken care off. Though unusual, it wasn't unheard of for turians to be called back into service for a mission now and again. Especially if someone was a career man who had done 20+ years. That sort of service record meant they had a lot of experience to handle tricky situations.

Which is why Garrus was being called into the Office as it were. The Office was the branch of the Hierarchy that handled everything Thanked related. If it sounded unturian, then it fell under the Office's jurisdiction. Like assassinating a pirate king who could no longer be controlled through bribes and threats.

Turns out some pirate had managed to actually organize a sizable fleet and was using said fleet to raid shipping lanes. Normally this sort of thing was handled by local Navy elements but the self proclaimed 'pirate king' had taken over Alpha, a hollowed out asteroid base. And on that base were some pretty heavy shielding and big guns. Big enough to keep most ships away. So if the pressure got a little too hot, the pirates just holed up for a bit to let the heat die down. The Office was tired of the cycle and wanted Garrus to make it stop.

The plan was simple enough. Infiltrate the most retched hive of scum and villainy this side of the Horse Head Nebula, shoot the bastard and get out. Ideally the king's death would cause a power vacuum and the infighting would lessen the piracy on the shipping lanes.

Of course, even with his scars he was recognized almost immediately. Turns out _Mass Effect_ was a big hit out here. Even better, the pirate king was a huge fan. That made it easy get close to him. Made it easy to gain his confidence. Turned the simple 3 day operation into a month long one. That's how long Garrus worked the guy until he felt there were no more secrets to glean. Only then did Garrus finally shoot the bastard. After having gotten all the information he needed to completely dismantle the entire pirate network and passed it along.

But nothing ever goes according to plan. Garrus spent a week running around Alpha. The last 3 days were spent holed up in a small compound fending off wave after wave of mercs. Turns out the pirate king was sort of a popular guy with his lieutenants. And said lieutenants were hell bent on exacting revenge on Garrus for taking out their boss.

And it wasn't just wave after wave of savage snarling salarians. There were some vocha, the odd krogan who took forever to go done, a few lost and angst filled asari with their biotics, a couple of big nasty mechs, and even a military gunship complete with Gatling gun and missiles. It had not been fun taking that down.

But the extraction team finally showed up and whisked him away. Counting travel time to and from Alpha, Garrus was gone 7 weeks.

-0-0-0-0-0-

Liara and Jane managed to move their friend off the floor and to her office. Both of them being biotics made the task much easier than it would have otherwise been. Tali was no small thing after all. Both were still rattled by what they had heard and were arguing over whether or not Tali had the right to know when the quarian in question woke up.

"... right to know. She's sleeping with him for Goddess' sake."

"Who's sleeping with who know?" Tali asked groggily.

"You're sleeping with Garrus." was the terse reply from Jane before the redhead realized that the unconscious redhead was now awake. "That's not a valid reason. Everyone has their secrets."

Tali flushed purple. No matter how many times Jane teased her about that Tali couldn't help but feel a little embarrassed. She wasn't embarrassed about sleeping with Garrus. She was rather fond of it actually, even if all they did was make out a little and then actually sleep. Tali just felt that was a private matter. Quarians didn't talk about such things in public and neither did turians. Humans and asari had a much more drell aligned view on sex and anything related to it. Everything was game and thus open to discussion.

"Erm, well. Yes I am. How, how is that relevant? And how did I end up in my office?"

"After you fainted we brought you here. Nearest couch big enough to hold you." Liara answered waving her hand at Tali who was laid out on said couch. "And yes everyone has their secrets but this is too big to be kept secret. Besides a healthy relationship shouldn't have secrets. Not like that."

"He can lie. You have any idea what that means? He lied straight to our faces and told us to do the same to her! Clearly whatever he does is meant to be kept secret."

"Who lied?" Tali asked, a little annoyed that one of her previous questions had been ignored. But Liara and Jane were arguing and Tali could tell it there had to be something else at work here. Whatever they were worked up about was just the surface of it. Something else was fueling the argument and this was just the most convenient outlet.

"Doesn't matter. I still say we tell her what we heard. And I'm telling Brown. She's his sister, she definitely has the right to know."

Jane bristled at that and glared at Liara. "You don't even tell your sister everything." Jane gave a hard short laugh. "You haven't even told her we're not just fucking. Or that you're also fucking Solana. Why should Solana know about this?"

Tali watched as it was Liara's turn to become a lovely shade of dark blue. "Who I see is not my sister's concern. And it's Solana's concern when her brother does something dangerous for a living."

"We don't even know what his job entails!"

"All right that's enough!" Tali said cutting off whatever Liara's reply was going to be. Tali had grown tired of listening to the lover's quarrel and she wanted to know what had set them off. "If it involves Garrus I demand to know about it. Just tell me word for word what he said and what happened and I will draw my own conclusions. Then you two can go back to fighting with each other." Tali didn't like putting on her 'boss voice' with people she considered friends but they had gotten so into their argument they weren't answering her questions.

"So what happened after I fainted." Tali turned to Liara since Liara seemed to be the one that wanted to tell her things.

Jane glared at Liara for a moment before throwing up her hands in the air and sitting down on the couch next to Tali. Liara moved to the couch as well, sitting on the other side of Tali.

"He asked us to tell you that he was going on an exclusive time limited fishing trip. Noodling he said, though I'm not sure what that means. But he was clearly lying, Tali. What military in any species offers fishing trips to retired members?"

"At least start at the beginning." Jane muttered from behind Tali. The quarian watched as Liara's normally pleasant features contorted themselves into a scowl that was directed at the human behind her.

"Fine. After you passed out, Garrus spoke with his son. Or at least he called him 'son' and they had some idle small talk. Something about a promotion. Then the other turian gave Garrus this black envelope and said something about 'the office wanting him to perform a hunt.' Then he told us to lie to you. And when they were leaving the sound stage he told the other two turians 'hunting implies a chance at failure. I don't hunt, I kill.'"

Tali nodded and leaned back against the couch to absorb it all. It also meant she was no longer blocking Jane and Liara's views of each other and they went straight back to glaring at each other.

It was a lot to take in but Tali thought she had a basic grasp of what had happened. She'd go home and be stressed out about it later but right now she had to iron out a few things with Jane and Liara.

"Okay here is what is going to happen. You can tell Solana if you want to. If you don't I will. She deserves to know that her brother has been taken away on some clandestine mission for the Hierarchy. Now I'm not sure exactly what his job is but I do know two things. First off, he is good at it and secondly you are not to talk to anyone about it. I'm dead serious." Tali leveled an even look at either woman beside her.

"He is something that the turians call 'the Thanked.' Apparently his job was so shitty that no one in turian society is suppose to ask him about it ever. If anyone does figure out what his job was, you are just supposed to say thank you and then never ever bring it up again. Those are the rules and that is how we are going to handle it. All right?" Tali only got curt nods in reply.

"Good now go home and cool off. I will see you both after the weekend." Tali waited until they were on their feet and headed towards the door. "And guys, whatever it is you are really fighting about, you should talk it out. Trust me when I say it's a lot less painful that way. Feelings won't be hurt as much. If you want I could mediate or you can just talk to me in private too. And thanks for taking care of me."

Tali only got a pair of nods again and she watched as the human and asari left her office. Once their footsteps faded Tali got out her omnitool and dialed up her turian sister.

"Hey Brown." Tali said by way of greeting.

"Brown?" Solana asked, her tone clearly curious.

"Yeah, Liara called you that. She and Jane were having a big spat over something. Just so you know."

"Oh Spirits. It's because of my fringe color." Solana explained. "I'm Brown, Jane is Red, and Liara is Blue."

"Ah."

"So what's up? You usually don't call unless something unpleasant happened."

"Your nephew came by and his dad off on a 'fishing trip.'" Tali tried her best to keep her tone from being angry. Detached and aloof was the best she could do.

There was a pause on the other end of the line followed by a string of turian and quarian swearing. "Oh Tali I'm so sorry you found out this way. You know I would have told you but it wasn't my place. And I honestly haven't thought about him in years until recently. Garrus told me he was going to tell you soon. Like this month soon."

A tight tension that Tali didn't even realize had been there eased a little in her chest. Solana had never lied to her and Tali had no reason to believe that she ever would. Granted Garrus had never lied to her either. Technically he hadn't lied to her, he merely asked Liara and Jane to lie to her for him but the point remained. Right now though she was taking that new lying Garrus and putting him in a little box in the corner of her mind to be dealt with later.

"Where are you? Do you want me to come over?" Solana asked.

"No. I'm at the studio office anyway. I just wanted you to know that Garrus is gone. You should let your folks know. And Jane and Liara were sort of there for that and they got into a huge fight over something. You should probably help sort that out as I think you are involved. Oh and I told them about Garrus being a Thanked but you might want to remind them to shut up about it."

"Okay, I'll let Mom and Dad know about Garrus. And thanks for the heads up."

"And sis?"

"Yeah."

"Listen, I know we don't really talk about relationships much but just promise me you know what you're doing with those two."

"Tali..."

"I just don't want you to get hurt."

"I'm a big girl. And I've been doing this for far longer than you I'll have you know."

"I worry because I care."

"I know. I have to go but sis?"

"Mmm?"

"Love you."

"Love you, bye."

Tali just left herself slump again the couch and let her mind go blank for a little bit. Today was really a huge overload of information and she didn't want to really process it all yet. All she wanted was a nice dinner date with Garrus, then to strip down to her nightie and cuddle next to him while she read a good book. And then go to sleep being spooned by him. Was that really too much to ask?

Instead she went home for dinner which surprised her brother Adrian. What with their father gone most of the time and their mother off doing who know what, he was sort of used being alone on that night of the week. Not that he wasn't happy to have his sister's company.

Adrian proved to be a good distraction. Tali told him that Garrus had been taken away for a business trip unrelated to C-Sec. That wasn't a lie but it wasn't the truth though Tali wasn't sure of what the truth was herself.

It felt nice having an evening catching up with her little brother. They played a board game to pass the time and just chatted about whatever came to mind. They talked a little business, discussed how their various capital ventures were doing, the stock market's latest upswing, and wondered if they were see their father before their mother's birthday that year. They wondered just what their mother did with her time as they never saw her. Neither parent had been around much as they grew up and were around even less the older they got. Now that Tali had finished her apprenticeship and Adrian was mostly done with his, they hardly ever saw either one of them. This despite the fact both of them still lived at home.

Eventually though the siblings called it a night and retired to their respective bedrooms. There, without Adrian to distract her, Tali was forced to sit down and sift through the day's events.

Whatever Garrus' job was, it was dangerous and had a high probability of him killing someone. That thought really didn't sit well with Tali. Both because it was dangerous and because she had a hard time thinking of Garrus capable of being someone that could end someone's life. He could be tough yes, intimidating, and scary even. But somehow she never thought him capable of killing. He boasted a perfect record at C-Sec for having been in shoot outs and never having killed anyone in any of those. Wounded yes but it was always a shot to the leg or arm that incapacitated the perp so they could be arrested. His aim was that good. He was also the reigning shooting champ with long guns at C-Sec.

More disturbing was the fact that he asked people to lie for him. Turians just don't do that. They don't lie and they don't ask others to lie for them. Omit the truth, sure. Give half answers and dance around the truth, most definitely. But if asked point blank a turian would not lie. And she was going to ask him point blank where he went. Somehow though, Tali got this sickening feeling Garrus would look her dead in the eyes and lie. If any turian could do it, it would be her Garrus and that frightened her. It frightened her because that meant he might have lied to her in the past and...

Tali stopped that line of thinking. As uneasy as she was feeling right now, she had to trust him and she did. Clearly he had told the girls to lie to her in some ill conceived notion that he could protect her from his former job. As if she didn't know he had had a former job. Then it struck her. He didn't know that she knew he was Thanked. She'd have to tell him when he got back. Oh she'd still make him apologize for lying and asking Liara and Jane to lie for him. And he was going to have to promise to never do that again. The lying part at least. She was fairly sure she couldn't make him promise never to run off because of old work. And she didn't want to have him make her a promise he couldn't keep.

She was going to make him divulge any more shocking information he might be hiding. A son, really? And he looked around her age. One would think, that in the 8 years she had known the family and more importantly him, that would have come up. Except that it never did. Why would it? She never asked if Garrus was ever married, or had kids. Hells, she never asked about his past. He just sort of gave her information about it in these spurts and Tali just had gotten used to them. And according to Solana, the whole having a son was on deck to be talked about soon.

Tali sighed. Solana. She really did love her sister to death but the last year had been sort of a rough one when it came to her. Tali wasn't a prude. She wasn't really. She had just taken a different road than Solana. The whole being a young teen star, at least in dancing circles, is that the public sexualized her. Made her into this object to either be fantasized about or idolized. And she'd done a little fighting back against that image in terms of being idolized. She could talk to or write other dancers who put her up on that pedestal. The creeps that fantasized about her as a sex object though, those she tried not to let get to her.

But try as she might she couldn't get away from it growing up. Sometimes she'd see a piece of mail that accidentally managed to pass through the screening process. Or someone would get her email and send her either a terrifying email about what they wanted to do to her. Or send pictures of their junk. What was up with that? Either way she'd change emails and try to block out all the perversion. And she knows it colored her thinking. How could it not? Part of her wanted it to be romantic like in the books she read or in the movies or on TV. And part of her was afraid. Deeply truly afraid that she wouldn't live up to the hype about her.

She knew that was stupid. Letting what other people thought about her affect her thinking. But years of even indirect exposure to that sort of toxicity had a way of getting to a person. So Tali was afraid that somewhere along the line Garrus might have heard some of the sick things said about her. He must have now that Tali thought about. Why else would he be so passive with her in bed? Either he was being the sweetest guy in the universe and letting her set the pace of things or she had failed already and he was just stringing her along.

Ugh. Tali wanted to scream in frustration but that would wake up Adrian and have him burst into her room to see what the matter was. Well Adrian and about 5-6 security guards. Part of Garrus' charm was that he made her feel so safe. She could do anything with him even if it was clumsy and she had no idea what she was doing. She still felt like he wasn't going to judge her and he certainly wasn't pressuring him for anything. Maybe her supposed reputation as a sex pot hadn't reached his ears then.

Tali shook her head to clear it. She shouldn't go jumping to conclusions. She should follow the advice she gave Jane and Liara and talk to Garrus about this. Well this and a few other items. They really had to have a sit down and talk about their relationship. Tali wondered if she shouldn't corner her sister and talk to her about her relationship with Liara and Jane.

While Tali had chosen not to engage in living up to being a sex pot idol, Solana sort of embraced it in their teenage years. There were a lot of random guys that Tali knew about. There was some drug use at one point but Tali had stepped in and made Solana cut that out before it got too bad. Same with alcohol. Might be legal under turian law but she wasn't going to watch her sister drown herself in a poor attempt at escaping the world. As it was Solana sort of gained a real reputation of being an easy lay. It didn't seem to bother her any and Tali knew for a fact that Solana had encouraged that reputation in their teenage years. Now though, Tali thought her sister was burning out a little. She most definitely had burned out on the male gender.

Tali wasn't sure exactly when Solana had switched teams as it were but she only found out because she had walked in on Solana and her date one day. Tali just hoped that Solana slowed down and didn't burn out on women as well. Personally she thought that Solana had given up on finding a man that would love her for her, not for being an easy roll in the hay.

So Tali was rather concerned about whatever was going on between Solana and Jane and Liara. She knew that Solana and Jane were fucking. She knew that Solana and Liara were fucking because Jane said so. She strongly suspected that Jane and Liara were also fucking. At the very worst they were a triangle of sex friends. Somehow though, Tali didn't think they were all just friends. Friends don't fight like she saw Liara and Jane fight. Tali just wondered where that left Solana.

Was her sister just a third wheel or was it a true love triangle?

-0-0-0-0-0-

Garrus was glad to spend the time he did with his son. Truth be told he was a terrible dad. Decent father, but terrible dad. He didn't really know his own kid but he tried damn it. He sent letters and talked to him over the extranet once a month. Thankfully Leto was very understanding and accepted how things were and loved his father. That's all Garrus could really hope for and he was happy with that. Given the circumstances, Garrus knew just how lucky he was that his son wanted to interact with him at all.

Garrus had been picked up practically out of Basic and sent straight to the Office. His shooting accuracy is what got him noticed and why he got given that job in the first place. It was there he learned how to be a bad turian. How to cheat, steal, fight dirty, and most importantly lie about it. He learned how to hack into computer systems and how to think on his feet. He learned how to kill people with a myriad of items. He learned how to be an assassin and he was a damned good one. His specialty was long ranged sniping but he could get the job done in almost any imaginable manner.

He didn't keep track of the number of missions he did. Partly to distance himself a little from his work and partly because he had honestly lost track. And partly because number of missions did not equate kills. There could be multiple targets on any given mission and there were always additional bodies that got in the way. Most security guards.

And he did all this being the favorite pet of one of the higher ups. Ceto, had a habit of taking new recruits and making them into pet projects of hers. She really enjoyed breaking them in, in all ways. When an older lady picks you up, you just sort of go with it. Or so Garrus had thought back then.

So Ceto showed Garrus the ropes. How the Office worked, how to be a good assassin/spy, how to be her perfect toy in the bedroom. It did help his advancement. He climbed the ranks fairly quickly. Not too quickly to draw attention but just a little faster than his peers did. Somewhere along the way she got pregnant. Given that turians have a mating season during which is the only time females can get pregnant, one would have thought this sort of thing could have been avoided. But he had been gone a while and they had gotten carried away and forgot the condom.

At first Garrus was sort of happy about it. She could retire, and once he finished up his mandatory 8 years he could get out and they could be a happy little family together. Oh how wrong he had been. She wanted nothing to do with the egg after it was laid. Garrus didn't have the means nor stability in his life to care for it so he did the only thing he could do. He sent it to the Vakarian flock compound on Palaven. His aunts and uncles and other relatives took care of it for him, and the chick that inevitably hatched out from it. That's what family is for after all.

He almost every cent he made back home. His family might be raising his kid but they were doing it on his dime. And he tried to visit when he could but it wasn't easy. Things soured between Ceto and himself and she made his life miserable. And he just sort of took it. He didn't have an out. Not really. He need the money for his son, and she was far too high on the chain of command for him to be able to escape her.

So she kept on using him as she had before and he hated every moment of it. Every touch, caress, and climax felt dirty and vile to him and he knew that she knew that. He was pretty sure it was part of what got her off. His only saving grace was the fact he was good at his job. The 3 'happy' years he had had with Ceto and the favoritism she had shown him had gotten others to notice him too. This afforded him some measure of protection as others higher up the chain took to using him for their operations.

He earned a reputation for being solid and it got him promotions. By the time he done his 20 years and could retire at half pay he had made Commander. It was strictly for pay reasons only. He never went to any leadership schools that one would have normally gone to in the command ranks. Still he got to wear the uniform and people just assumed he was a Commander. He wasn't going to correct them.

Garrus had only stayed in those 16 grueling years since his son's egg was laid solely for the benefits it afford him. The Office did have an outstanding benefits package for its members and their family as long as the member was still an active one. Once they retired those benefits only applied to the former member. They still got normal military benefits that extended to the family but it was a step back from Office benefits.

Once Leto turned 15 and went off to Basic, Garrus finished out his 20th year and moved as far away as he could from Ceto. Leto, bless his heart, had sort of figured out that his dad loved him but couldn't be around much because of his job. By the time Leto went to Basic, he understood that now his father was changing jobs, only this time Leto was the one that wouldn't be home because of his job. It was unfair but that was how life was and Leto had taken it in stride. Not to say he didn't rebel in his own fashion. Just as his father hadn't gone to the Military Police, he didn't either. That's why he ended up as a Navigator. On top of that he managed to earn a commission. Garrus had been so proud.

The trip going to Alpha had been a good chance for them to spend time together and they had a good time with it. The trip back was hell though. Being chased around an asteroid for a week leaves one with very little time to sleep. Being holed up in a compound for 3 days leaves one with even less time to sleep. So Garrus had been forced to use combat stims, something he swore he was done with when he retired.

Combat stimulations, either in pill or injection form, were wickedly powerful drugs. They numbed pain, dampened appetites, and just straight up made you forget there was a thing called sleep. As long as you stayed hopped up on them, you could go a few weeks, or longer, so long as you remembered to eat and drink once in a while. And they were highly addictive. The crash though was just awful. The uncontrollable rapid breathing, shakes, agitation, short temper, constant thirst, vomiting, nerve pain, and general inability to sleep due to all of the above symptoms.

If one served in combat arms, chances were excellent that they had used combat stims at least once in their life. Chances were also good that if they had used it more than once they had been an addict. While turians generally are okay with people doing their own thing so long as it doesn't affect their work or other people, combat stim abuse is something the Hierarchy clamps down on. It's a dirty little secret not talk about with none turians. It's barely talked about between those in combat arms, let alone the larger population.

Combat stims are tightly controlled and give out on missions only. Even then there is a strict detox program that Garrus had done through when he retired. Mercifully, the captain of the frigate he was on didn't force that on him. They just more or less locked him in a sleeper pod for his safety as much as theirs. Being a raving ranting mess wasn't something he wanted his son to see him as, Garrus couldn't stop him from seeing him.

"Look dad, I know this isn't you, it's the job. So stop trying to hold it together so much. Look at it this way. Let it all out now so that by the time we make it back to the Citadel you've let most of the crazy out already, okay?"

-0-0-0-0-0-

He was gone for 7 weeks. He had missed 3 shows and was going to miss his 4th. Social media was abuzz with his 'disappearance.' Tali wasn't sure if she had made it better or worse when she released a statement saying that while _Mass Effect_ hadn't killed off his character. Judging from the responses on the official forums, few people had bought that.

It was a welcome but torturous distraction, the extranet. It was sort of fun reading up all the crazy fan theories that tried to reconcile his absence from the show with the advancing plot. It was a real shame he missed the big Virmire episode. Partly to deflect attention away from him missing, and because Kaiden had relapsed and was going to have to do some jail time, Tali had given the go ahead to kill off his character. Garrus would have been perfect for giving that speech about holding the line to a squad of turians who were helping Jane that particular episode.

Some of the fan theories were quite good actually. One had him going all rogue and running off to be a vigilante. Another had him killed off by the mob because of a drug deal gone wrong. Another said he had run off to because a circus performer. But most seemed to agree he had simply gone back to the military for some reason.

At least that is what most of the fan fiction written about him said. Yes Garrus had fan fiction. Granted Tali had fan fiction written about her too. Everyone in the show did. It was nice to see actually. Most of it wasn't that great, but then again not everyone was a professional writer. And most of it was about Jane.

That was understandable. She was the big star of the show after all. But there was a pretty clear divide that was easy to see in the fan fiction. People either paired Jane Shepard up with Garrus, which was amusing to see, or stuck with the party line and paired her with Liara. They even had collective names; Shakarian vs. Shiara. Tali was considering ordering up shirts with Team Shakarian and Team Shiara written on them. They'd make a killing on those for sure.

The Shakarian stories were the more entertaining ones to read. The show had officially paired up Jane with Liara, so it was fun to see how the writers broke that particular bit of canon. Some did it quick and acted like it never happened, others really drew out the process and dug into the characters souls and made them agonize over it.

Which sadly, was sort or mirroring real life. Tali didn't know for sure if anything had happened between them after that weekend, but Liara and Jane were a little tense around each other. Friendly and polite but there was a hint of tension between them just buzzing under the surface. Oddly, it only seemed to help them given off sexual tension on screen, which was great, because their characters hadn't officially become a thing yet. They were just extremely heavily implied.

It was Liara who came to her first.

"Solana and I want you to talk to Jane for us."

Tali looked up from her paperwork, and just raised an eyebrow at Liara. The asari had become a common sight at the Vakarian household in the last 7 weeks. Tali knew that because she had become a common sight as well. More common that is. She'd taken to practically living in his room in a futile attempt to comfort herself in his absence. But in that time Liara had become a staple of the household as well and openly accepted by Solana's parents.

Tali wasn't exactly sure what sort of reaction she had been expecting when Solana finally told her parents that she was into girls. Executor Vakarian had merely nodded at the announcement and sat back as his wife Camilla did most of the questioning. It was all so benign too. How long those two had been going out, what Liara did for a living, who her parents were, did Garrus know?

With Liara now free to wander in and out of the Vakarian residence, she'd taken to spending a lot of time there. Most days Tali would commute to the studio with her. And Tali wasn't jealous. Out of the closet and practically living together in just 7 weeks? Meanwhile after 7 years all Tali got was one night a week and a chaste make out session.

Still, Tali did get to know the asari pretty well. Solana and Tali still did plenty of things together and Liara was very gracious about letting them have their time. Or she wouldn't have been if Solana hadn't made her join in. It was nice though to have another female friend. Not that they weren't friends before, but there was always this subtle barrier of Tali being the boss that kept Liara at bay. At the Vakarian's, that barrier just sort of disappeared, and Tali found that she liked that a lot.

So Liara was initiated into the ways of the Vakarian household and more importantly into Tali and Solana's sisterhood. And for the most part Liara fit right in. The only thing she found completely ridiculous, and she never wasted an opportunity to remind them of this, was the fact that Tali and Solana didn't talk about relationships with each other.

"I tell my sister everything! And she's half hanar! And 300 years older than me!"

Apparently, "That's just the way we are" doesn't count as a valid defense.

So when Liara came to Tali and said what she said, all Tali could do was raise her eyebrow at her. The asari knew better, and it irked Tali that Liara would lie to her.

"Okay fine but she is worried too. Jane won't return any of our calls at all now. Won't respond to emails, messages, or notes. She's not talking to any of our mutual friends either. We even wrote her a letter on real paper and had it hand delivered by a courier service. And she hasn't been in the paper in weeks, so Goddess only knows what she's been doing with herself." Liara said as she paced back and forth in front of Tali's desk.

"So why would she talk to me? Plus this would be stepping over a line Liara. I'm her boss, and yours, and I can't just go meddling into other people's lives. Even if 2/3rds of the equation are asking me to. Or 1/3rd as the case seems to be." Tali wondered if she needed to talk to Liara about being less, familiar, with her at work. At the Vakarians Tali really did enjoy that the boss-employee dynamic had disappeared but Liara had started to push things a little while at work. Maybe not though, Liara had had the good sense to at least talk to her in private after all.

"Brown is worried just as much as I am. And she would tell you herself if you two weren't so silly. We love her. Both of us, together. And we would have wanted nothing more than to have presented her to both our parents at the same time."

"Then why didn't you wait until this was all sorted out?" Tali asked leaning back in her office chair. Liara didn't look like she was going to leave soon so Tali abandoned her electronic paperwork.

"Because that was one of the things we were fighting about. Apparently you dual gendered species get all bent out of shape if the same genders date each other." Liara's presentation of Solana had gone swimmingly according to what Solana told Tali. Of course it had. She was ASARI!

"Right so what do you want me to do? Tell her that you two came out as a couple?"

"Yes! And we want to come out as a threesome with her."

Tali was still trying to wrap her head around that. They had made it work for some 6 months before this little break, so maybe they could make it work long term. Though Tali thought that maybe it was better this way. Every threesome she had ever heard of always ended in tragedy. Granted every threesome she'd ever heard of were from ancient tales or TV dramas. So morality tales and programs designed around relationship failure probably weren't the best sources of information.

"Ok, I'll talk to her."

Tali didn't do it at work though. If Liara and Solana wanted her to talk to Jane, she'd do it after work. Judging by the sad weary look, the human redhead was expecting her. Whatever Tali was expecting, this wasn't it. And she certainly hadn't been excepting Jane to ask if she would go somewhere with her. But Tali acquiesced. The conversation they were going to have was going to be awkward, so maybe it would be a little less awkward for Jane if she at least got to pick her battleground.

So they went in silence, taking public rapid transport down to the lower wards. From there they walked a few blocks away from the nicer areas near the circular center of the Citadel towards the dingier camped apartment blocks of the outer rings.

"I don't belong with them. They're so far out of my league." With that Jane opened up her apartment and held the door open to let Tali in. It was a shoebox. A very neat and tidy shoebox but it was a shoebox. That's the only way Tali could describe the tiny studio apartment she was looking at. There was a cot in one corner, a single plastic table with two plastic chairs in some semblance of a dining area. The bathing area was curtained off with a heavy show curtain, a single dresser and a few cubby holes with a few knickknacks in them.

"Yeah, this is where I live. Before you ask, all my money from the show went to partying and paying off old debts."

"So this is why you were so mad with Liara when she said you should have no secrets." Tali said as she took a seat in one of the plastic chairs. Tali liked to think she wasn't horribly spoiled but sitting in that little plastic chair was wracking her with guilt because she just felt so uncomfortable in it. Partly from the situation, and partly because it was cheap, stiff plastic. She thought she had a good handle on how the other 99.99% lived. Apparently not. She was so going to donate so much more this coming year to charities.

"This is one of them. So yeah. I'm broke, but what else is new?" Jane gave out a forced, harsh bite of a laugh as she flopped herself in the chair opposite Tali.

"Then why all the parties?"

"Publicity. Get my name out there. I wasn't sure how long your gig was going to last so I sort of wanted to enjoy myself a little bit."

Tali nodded. It made some sense though there would have been better ways to achieve those means. Less drinking and sleazy tabloids and more agents and interviews.

"I used to be a prostitute and dancer. And a drug addict. Liara and Solana don't need someone like that in their life."

"Solana is a dancer. I used to be one." Tali commented.

"Not a dancer like you. A strip bar dancer." Jane said with an exasperated sigh.

"Look Jane why are you telling me all this?"

"So you can tell them and they will realize they are better off without me. Plus Solana hasn't even come out of the closet yet. She shouldn't have to throw a three way relationship on top of that. Oh and look here."

Jane got up and went to the one of the cubbies and came back with a lavishly decorated blue envelope. She pulled out three sheets of creamy white paper, all of which had equally frilly and fancy bordering. One letter was in unified turian script, another in universal asari and the last was in human basic. Tali could only read the turian one but she'd hazard a guess they all said the same thing.

"They sent that to me two weeks ago. I have no idea what any of those say."

"This last one is in human ba"

"I can't read."

"What?" Was all Tali could manage.

"I didn't even finish middle school alright? All my teachers just passed me along until I just dropped out. Got noticed by a pimp and yeah." Jane just let her last sentence sort of fade away.

"You really should be telling this to both of them. They love you and miss you. Their worried about you."

Jane just snorted.

"Solana presented Liara to her parents. They were perfectly fine with it." Tali offered and immediately wished she hadn't. The look that Jane gave her was as if the quarian had just stabbed her in the heart.

"See? I drop out and they move forward." Jane said with a tight, forced smile that didn't even come close to reaching her eyes.

"They did it for you, you idiot." It was Tali's turn to be exasperated. This whole being the go between was turning out to be rather tedious. To stop herself from glaring at Jane, Tali just read the letter that was in turian. Well skimmed it really. It was your basic please stop hiding, come talk to us, we love you sort of letter.

"Just tell them I'm not worth it okay? And if they really loved me they would let me go."

"Alright, I will tell them but I am going to tell you that you are being an idiot. You really should sit down and tell them everything you told me. See how much they won't care about it. They aren't expecting you to be perfect Jane. No one is perfect. Everyone has baggage. You can't run away from your issues. You have to talk about them with your partner. S. Otherwise you just make everyone miserable, yourself included."

"One other thing Tali. I want off the show."

**A/N: I always thought it was weird that they killed off Shepard in between ME1 and ME2 just to bring Shepard immediately. So I threw in my own reason as to why they would kill off Shepard. On the bright side of things, I found out I can use my phone as a wifi hot spot so I'm uploading the last two chapters I've written. Yay! So that's about 14k words for you just slogged through.**


	7. The Summer Hiatus

**The Show Must Go On (The Summer Hiatus)**

The universe was conspiring against her. She knew it. Things had been going so well too. The show as doing fantastic. None of the stars had become divas yet, everyone was getting along. Things were slowly but surely happening between Garrus and herself. Life had been good 3 months ago.

Then everything went sideways. Well not everything. In fact almost nothing did. The only real big changes were really minor relationship issues. If one considers the government taking away one's sort of, but not really, but so totally was, boyfriend on a clandestine mission minor. And if one considers one's sister coming out of the closet minor. And if you were somehow caught up in a weird love triangle related to said closet coming out of thing. Things were complicated.

There wasn't much Tali could do. The season was coming to a close and Jane wanted out. She had every right to do so even if Tali thought she was doing for the wrong reasons. Solana wasn't happy with her to say the least. Liara had made a scene so big her parents couldn't tamp down the gossip magazines.

Still, they did it. They shot a trailer for the next season in which they killed off lieutenant commander Jane Shepard. After that Liara wanted off the show as well. It started off a chain reaction really. Save for Joker and Chakwas, damn near everyone of the major faces quit. The _Normandy _crew had been disbanded.

It wasn't ideal but the bright side of things was that Tali could take what she had learned over the last year and apply it to the new season. Yes that was cold of her but she was running a business. And it helped her distance herself from the sense of hurt she felt when everyone quit. Ugh, they'd have to have auditions again.

Still things looked up. The multi species cast thing had worked out beautifully. Tali was thinking of expanding out to include more species this time. So she sent out feelers to work over the summer break to see just what people might be okay with.

That, though was all in the future. Right now she wanted nothing more than to beat a certain turian senseless.

A month. He'd been back on the Citadel a month and hadn't told her. And Solana had known! Now Tali was just as mad at her sister as Solana was at her for killing Jane's character off. To be fair, he'd spent that month in a rehab facility for combat stim detox.

The only reason she even knew about it was because of Leto the younger as he was called. Garrus' son. He'd shown up at the residence one day saying he had a week off while his ship was getting some repairs done. And the boy had declared he was just in time for his old man to get out of rehab.

Tali snorted. The boy. That boy was a year older than she was. If she had met him under different circumstances she might have just thought of him as a guy. A cute guy, but a guy none the less. Instead he was a physical manifestation of all her doubts that just screamed at her that she knew so little about Garrus' life before C-Sec. She didn't hold it against Leto. Not really. Or at least she tried not to. It was just hard though given what he presented. So she settled for being neutral towards him. That was the best she could manage at the time.

-0-0-0-0-0-

Garrus couldn't help be grimace a little when he saw that Natalia had come to see him get out of rehab. She looked pissed. His family came forward to greet him with hugs and head bumps and she just stood there glaring at him, arms crossed and foot a tapping. Spirits she looked beautiful in her black flats, blue jeans and plain red shirt. Even with her face obscured behind her veil and her features twisted into a scowl at him Garrus still thought she looked lovely. Once everyone had greeted him she finally moved up to him and threw a hard right hook into his left arm.

"Ow. What was that for?" Garrus said rubbing the spot she had punched. It was definitely going to brush.

"That is for making me worry." Tali growled. She threw her arms around his neck and hauled him down into a kiss. "That is for coming back to me." Tali didn't make the kiss a long one. Her veil was in the way as always, and she was a bit self conscious of the fact Garrus' entire family were only a few feet away. But that didn't stop her from trying to channel every emotion she'd felt towards him in the last 3 months. There was a bit of anger, understanding, longing, frustration, lust, worry, fear and absolute terror. By the end of the short kiss Tali's breathing was ragged and she was trying very hard not to cry. She didn't resist when Garrus tucked her head onto his shoulder, and she buried her face into his neck.

Garrus made what he hoped were comforting but quiet sounds. Having Tali fall apart on him was very unnerving. She was usually so strong. They'd have to talk about that. They had a lot to talk about really if he was honest with himself. But that would have to wait for just a little while. Garrus chatted with his family while they all pretended Tali wasn't collecting herself in his arms.

Once Tali got herself together they went out to lunch and Garrus got caught up with all that he had missed out on. Or at least most of it. Given vague language of some stories and the looks between Tali and Solana he wasn't getting the full details. And Tali was proving to be a major distraction with the way she was always touching him. Nothing overly sensual but she seemed to have a hand or foot touching some part of him throughout the entire meal.

There were two big stories to tell. Season One of _Mass Effect _ had ended with a bang and a promise of more to come. Garrus' character had been sidelined and sort of dropped due to him not being there. Garrus was a little sad that his character had gone out that way. A bang like Kaiden's character would have been much cooler. Seriously, it's hard to top going out in a mushroom cloud. But once Tali told him why Kaiden got axed, it made sense. She was sending a message to her actors that messing around too much would get you fired in such a way it was impossible to bring the character back. Though when Garrus heard about practically everyone leaving at the end of the season, he thought maybe Tali had gone a bit too far.

Jane leaving the show apparently was the catalyst for the chain reaction of walk outs. Tali said that Jane wanted out so they had shot the trailer for next season in which they did kill off her character. Spaced while rescuing Joker from the burning wreck of the _Normandy. _Garrus couldn't wait to see that. Judging from Solana's sharp look at Tali, there was a bit more to it though.

The other big story was Solana. When Garrus' little sister told him she had come out of the closest all he did was calmly congratulate her, which seemed to upset her.

"Why is no one surprised? Or angry or some other emotion other than calm?!"

Garrus leveled a flat look at his sister. "You know dad as a detective before right? And I'm a detective. You aren't exactly subtle about bringing your dates home either sis."

What did surprise Garrus, though, was who Solana's girlfriend was.

"Liara. As in from the show Liara?"

Garrus was greeted with a chorus of laughs and a promise from his sister to formally introduce them. The rest of the meal was spent talking to Leto the younger and trying to see what he would like to do. This was his first real visit to the Citadel so the family took some time to talk about various places to visit. Garrus noticed that Tali didn't contribute much to that conversation. Instead she spent most of the rest of the meal just tracing lazy patterns on his arm.

After lunch the family migrated back to the residence where everyone split off to do various activities. And as if through magic Garrus and Tali were suddenly left alone. He wordlessly guided her towards his room so that they could talk in private. He opened the door and motioned for her to enter the room before him. However the state of his room stopped him mid wave. There were a pair of opened suitcases against the back wall. A few extra pillows that did not match is bedspread were on his bed. And from what he could see of the closet, several rather feminine outfits were hanging there.

Tali entered the room, grabbing his arm and dragging him into it. She relinquished his arm only to take hold of his hand in both of hers.

"I sort of moved in after you... Afterwards. Helped me cope." Tali didn't look up to meet his questioning gaze. Instead she busied herself by playing with his hand. She wanted to talk to him. They had so much to talk about and discuss but now that the moment had arrived Tali found she'd rather be doing anything else. She also needed to gather up her things and leave. It was his place after all. She really should have packed up days ago so he'd have his room back when he got home. She probably had crossed some sort of line when she had moved in as a coping mechanism.

His sudden departure had rattled her far more than Tali would like to admit to herself. So while he was gone she didn't. Instead she boxed up that feeling and shoved to the farthest corners of her mind and happily trudged through work and all of its drama. And she'd been fine until the second date night since he left. Somehow she wound up at his place, probably driven there by habit, and had collapsed into his bed. It was the first time she had gotten a halfway decent night sleep in a week. It wasn't perfect. She still woke up feeling panicked but she'd quickly package up those feelings and banish them with the rest. It wasn't healthy but denial was the only way she had to cope with what she was feeling so she kept doing it. Slowly she found herself spending more and more nights in his bed and she gradually moved in. It made her commute to work shorter and most morning she shared it with Liara. And now she had to leave it.

"I'll pack up so I'm out of your hair." Tali said in a quiet sad voice.

Garrus blinked. He'd been letting Tali hold his hand as he looked around at his room. Once inside he could see she really had moved in. When Tali dropped his hand and made to move away from him, Garrus stepped forward and swept Tali up in tight embrace.

"Later. What did you mean by 'helped you cope'?"

Tali tucked herself into her spot, placing her head in the crook of his neck.

"I found I slept better if I..." Tali paused for a moment. She wasn't going to admit that the _smell_ of him on his pillow that she'd desperately hug at night helped trick her brain into letting get some sleep. "...was around your stuff." Tali managed to choke out her sentence.

Garrus leaned back a little to glance down at Tali who swiftly ducked her face into his shoulder. That still didn't stop him from seeing the beginning of tears sparkle in her eyes and it certainly didn't hide the fact that her breathing had picked up again.

"Natalia."

Tali had nearly broken the first time she was in his arms earlier in the day. She'd patched up the dam and kept it together for the 2 hours of family time. But now that dam had been crested. Those emotions she'd kept boxed up came rushing to the front of her mind now that the ordeal was over.

"YOU BOSH'TET!" Somehow Tali managed to get the words out around her sobbing while she pounded her fist into his chest. "I was so worried. I was terrified you might not come back. Do you have any idea what's it like? To know someone you love is out there doing something outrageously dangerous and you can't do a damned thing about it?"

After that Tali just sobbed and Garrus quietly took the hits though they became weaker and weaker until they finally stopped all together as Tali used all her energy to bawl on his shoulder. He gently guided them to the bed and helped her over the lip and only let go of her to get in and situate himself. She was back crying on his shoulder not a moment later.

Somewhere between the beating and sobbing and yelling Garrus' mind picked up on the fact that his Natalia had said that she loved him, if in a roundabout way. He filed that away for later. Right now he was too busy trying to soothe her and feeling immensely guilty. Either Jane and Liara hadn't lied to her like he asked or Natalia hadn't bought the lie. Granted it wasn't the universes best or more convincing lie but he had been a bit rattled by the sudden call from the Office. Still, his absence had eaten at Natalia these past 3 months. And he was ashamed that he had caused that pain. And she was crying because of him. Again. That wasn't a good thing.

Eventually Tali's breathing evened out and Garrus felt her head tilt downwards a little so she could speak a bit easier.

"Sorry. I know I didn't handle that like a good turian woman would have. But I haven't been told all my life that you might wander off and get killed and that's perfectly normal and acceptable. And it's not you know." Tali's voice was hoarse from crying but it was much more steady now.

Garrus snorted. "I don't ever compare you to turian women. You are you and that's all I ever want you to be. As for how you handled it. Well, I've never had someone to come home to so I can't compare it to anything."

In the past had thought he had had home comings with Ceto. But looking back those were not home comings. A forced romp in the hay is hardly something to cherish and certainly something he always tried to distance himself from emotionally. His early attempted refusals had left him with more than a few scars on his body that weren't earned out in the field.

"But you have a son."

"Doesn't mean his mother and I were a happy couple. Or even a couple." Garrus frowned even though Tali couldn't see his facial expression. "How to explain. My work"

"Garrus?"

"Yeah."

"Solana told me what you are. That you are Thanked. And from what Jane and Liara overheard I think I have a good idea of what it is you do."

Garrus let out a sigh. In some ways he felt better. Like a great weight was off his shoulders that she knew. At the same time he was anxious. Confessing that you are a master assassin isn't something one does trivially.

"How, how much do you want to know?" Garrus asked. He felt Tali shift a bit as she settled a little more comfortably into his side before he heard and felt her sigh.

"If we're going to be truthful, I'm not sure. I'm afraid of what you'll tell me even though I'm also curious. You're 20 years older than I am Garrus." Tali said earning a snort in response. "That means you've had 20 years worth of living that I just don't know about. Well if you want to get technical it's closer to 34 years. When I was younger I didn't believe you existed. I thought Solana had made you up because she was jealous that I had a brother and she didn't."

Garrus couldn't help but laugh at that.

"Then you came bursting into my life and I've always thought of you as a protector. And not just because of the bombing. You work in C-Sec putting bad people in prison. I'm proud of what you do. Thinking of you as anything else is a little daunting. But at the same time I want to know. It's a part of who you are. A kind hearted, hard working turian, with a son older then I am, who can lie."

Tali finished her speech and Garrus mulled over her words, letting the silence blanket over them for a few moments.

"You have no proof that I can lie."

Not expecting Garrus to take the conversation in that direction Tali actually propped herself up on her arm to give him an incredulous look. "Jane told me that you told her a very blatant lie to tell to me."

"For all you know I really could have gone noodling."

"Except we both know you didn't. Noodling doesn't involve a month long detox program for stim addiction."

"Could have been an extreme form of noodling." Garrus jested only to see Tali's face transform into a hard glare. "Fine. However, asking a friend to lie for you is not the same as lying yourself."

"One of the shiny doodads on my military dress uniform is a marksmanship medal. I'm a decent shot with a long rifle and that got me noticed by certain people. So I spent my military career putting that skill to use. Of course I was trained in other things as well."

"Like lying." Tali added as she settled her head done onto his chest.

"Like lying. My work was to make problem makers disappear. And I was called back up because there was a very big problem that needed to disappear. It's a little like the exact opposite of my C-Sec job. Getting the mass murders before they murder anyone else."

"Proactive protecting, in a way."

"If you want to look at it like that. My call sign is Archangel."

This time it was Tali's turn to give a snort of laughter.

"I met Leto's mother when I was just starting out. She helped train me and guided my ascension up the ranks."

"And into her bed I'm assuming." Tali added wryly.

"Yes. Ceto has a bit of a reputation of breaking in the new talent as it were. And saying 'no' isn't an option." Garrus paused as a dark memory fluttered momentarily to the front of his mind. He quickly shoved it away. "That's how she wound up pregnant. And she wanted nothing to do with the egg after she laid it. So at 19 I had an egg to care for, and at 20 was a father. I couldn't care for him in my line of work so I sent him to live with relatives on Palaven. And all I could do was send money home. So despite having Ceto making my life miserable, I had impressed lots of people by then which kept me relatively safe. And the pay and more importantly the benefits were too good to walk away from. I had Leto to think about. So I stuck it out until Leto had seen his 15th summer and was off to Basic. I didn't need the money or benefits anymore so I finally stopped. Dad offered me a room if I wanted to come to the Citadel. And I've been working at C-Sec since."

"Oh." Was all that Tali could say. "It doesn't sound like you've gotten to spend much time with your son." Tali said. She suddenly felt guilty that she was taking up Garrus' time while Leto was on the station. Yes, she had a right to some of his time too but he'd still be here in 4 days. Leto wouldn't be.

"No. I would make a video call or write him a letter when I could. But his relatives raised him. I just sent money home. We get along alright though. I think over the years he's just accepted that this is the way our relationship is. It's not what either of us wanted but you don't always get what you want out of life. " Garrus replied wistfully. "I didn't want you to find out this way you know. About Leto I mean." He continued.

"It was quite the shock." Tali replied.

"I was planning on telling you soon at one of our dinner dates. Feel you out a little, see if you'd be willing to be with a guy that already had a kid. And if you were willing, I was going to ask you about being exclusive to each other."

"What?" Tali exclaimed as she catapulted herself upright to stare down at Garrus. In response the turian just propped himself up onto his elbows. Partly to lessen the angle at which he had to look up, and partly because Tali was flashing him the bottom of her face. She really needed to stop doing that. It just wasn't appropriate.

"Look Natalia, I was young once so I know what it's like. I won't pretend to know what you do on the nights you're not here but I'd really like to take our relationship to the next level. Be more serious. And for that to happen, you have to stop seeing whoever else you are seeing in addition to me."

Tali flapped her jaw open and shut a few times. Was he really suggesting that she slept around? That's it. She was going to kill him. Right here. With her bare hands.

Possibly for the better, Garrus took her muted response of shock as hesitation. To his mind he was asking a big thing. And he was. Surely a hot young thing like her had several boy toys. He remembered her birthday party. That was the life style of the rich and beautiful, wasn't it? Natalia Zorah definitely qualified. Adrian certainly was that way so he felt justified in his theory that his sister might act the same way. She was clearly just much better at keeping things discrete.

Garrus hoisted himself out of bed and looked around the room. She'd moved in here and was pretty tore up about him leaving. That gave him some hope. But they really had to move her out. It was the right thing to do and shouldn't be a factor in her decision making. "Look, I know it's a big step so don't give me an answer right away. Just think about it, alright? Now come on, let's get you packed up."

Together they worked to pack up Tali's things. Garrus kept things lively with a very sanitized retelling of his latest adventure. Once she was all packed up they ventured out into the common living area and found the rest of the Vakarians plus Liara there chatting. They joined in and Garrus told his story again for the benefit of his folks.

-0-0-0-0-0-

Tali dragged her bags back home, seething the whole way. Before she'd been angry because of how badly he had frightened her. Now she was angry at him for a whole different reason. Did he really think that SHE, of all people, would... She waited for him for 7 years just to start dating him for crying out loud! Somewhere, though in the back of her mind was a twinge of something. Plausibility perhaps. Sure she'd been out on a dates, even kissed a few of them but she had every right. He'd slept with ancestors knows how many people. With a build like his it was a miracle he was still single. Even with the scars he was gorgeous. No, no thinking about his buff body. She was mad at him damn it.

And she stayed mad at him for the next month. He cancelled their next few dates nights citing being swamped at work. He was never swamped at work. He was a lead detective, he had a whole team of people working under him. Why couldn't he let them handle things for a night?

It was a good thing it was the summer break because Tali was becoming increasingly grouchy as that month wore on. Her assistants lived in fear of her, especially her newest addition to her grown team of personal assistants. Now she had 5 of them, 4 dedicated to just running through everything related to _Mass Effect_.

At the very least, Tali limited her reign of terror only onto her assistants. The first time she got a little bitchy on an outing with Solana, her sister called her out on it.

"Why are you being so bitchy today?" Solana had questioned her. Hands on her hips, hips cocked to one side, and staring Tali dead in the eyes. It was her 'don't mess with me' stance. Tali knew that because she had the exact same stance. She wasn't sure who had taught it to whom.

"It's nothing." Tali tried to insist.

"Oh come off it. This is the first time we've gone out in months where it's just use and you are being a sour puss about everything. And you have bags to deep under your eyes I can see them through your veil. So I can tell you aren't sleeping well. And if you aren't sleeping well, something must be bothering you. Enough that you are lashing out at just about everything that moves."

"It's not something we can talk about. It would break a rule." Tali said snidely. Okay, maybe she was being a bitch about it but rules were rules.

"So what did my idiot brother do? Are you fighting? Because you haven't been over to the house all month." Solana asked, which earned her a questioning look from Tali. "Liara says I should try talking to you about you and Garrus. Says it would be good for both of us. Just no mushy details. I really don't need to know what you do with my brother. No matter how much I love both of you."

Hearing this Tali thought things over, debating what to tell Solana. It would be nice to talk to her to get a turian perspective.

"He said he wanted to take things to the next level. He said he wanted us to be 'exclusive.'" Tali used air quotes around the word. "And he insinuated I slept around as much as you used to. Or Adrian does."

Solana laughed causing Tali to bristle at the sound. "It's not funny." Tali snapped.

"Yes it is. He thinks you sleep around. What the hell did you do to him to make him think that. Actually I don't want to know. But come on. It is funny. You of all people sleeping around. You've had him up on a pedestal for years waiting to just kiss him never mind... You corrected him I'm assuming."

"About having him on a pedestal? Like I would ever admit to such a thing." Tali crossed her arms and glared at her so called sister. Solana only laughed more.

"No about you not sleeping around."

"I was too shocked to say anything. Then we packed up and he just told stories. He also said to think about for a while. Which is why I haven't been around lately."

"Any why you aren't sleeping well. What, I can see those bags under your eyes remember. And I was there the last time you got strung out on lack of sleep. I can steal one of his pillows for you if you want." Solana offered. It wouldn't so much be stealing as straight up telling her brother she was taking one of his pillows. He was sleeping on the couch anyway what with all the construction that was going on in his room. Which gave her an idea. Maybe she could ask daddy to have something similar done to her room. Maybe even install a little kitchen area for Liara to keep her own food. It would be extremely handy once Jane came around. Perhaps Garrus could help out. He and Jane got along well enough from what Liara told her. And if anyone could find her it would be her big brother.

"Are you even listening to me?" Tali asked even though she knew the answer. Solana had gotten a blank look on her face which Tali had seen many times over the years.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"I was asking if you'd heard anything from Jane. We put out the teaser trailer of her dying yesterday and there is already an extranet site petitioning we bring back her character."

"Well you were an idiot for killing her off in the first place." Solana replied heatedly.

"I told you it was _her _idea. I just thought maybe you'd heard from her. I want to try to talk her back onto the show. Since Liara quit it might make things easier." Tali explained. She also wanted to ask Jane a few questions that only she might be able to talk about. Something about Garrus' story about Ceto was unsettling and Tali suspected Jane of all people might be the only other person who might have experienced something similar to what Garrus had, given her previous career.

"Neither Liara nor I have heard from her. The last we heard was from you and all you told us. We even went to that apartment you told about but she moved out. But I think it's very much like big brother to ask you what he did. I know I'm to a good girl like you and if Adrian's behavior outside of work is anything to go by. Well, you can't blame him to thinking you sleep around. And, he likes you. A lot. You know that right?"

Despite herself Tali actually blushed and looked down at her now cold lunch. It was all very tame but actually talking to Solana about Garrus was just so new. And talking about emotions was a sensitive area. "He said he cared about me, yeah."

"Look, most turians don't really look to settle down until they are 40 plus. And if he's asking you to be 'exclusive' then it means he is serious about you girl. As far as I know, you're the only intended he's had in all the years he's been on the Citadel."

Tali whipped her head up. Intended. Sure Solana meant to use a different word. Because intended in quarian was serious. Super serious. Like the marriage contract was signed and the bride price paid sort of serious. "I, uh, his intended?" Tali managed giving Solana a look that was a mix of sheer terror and blissful happiness. It confused the hell out of the turian for a moment.

"Oh hang on." Solana said getting a wave in response from Tali. Solana opened her omnitool and opened up the turian-quarian dictionary. Having learned quarian ages ago, Solana didn't use her translator when talking to her sister. Tali likewise had learned and spoke turian as well as someone could without the necessary physiology for the subharmonics. But on extremely rare occasions there were sometimes words that just failed in translation. This seemed to be one of them.

"Girlfriend." Solana finally intoned having found the word she was looking for. It was such a strange word. Turians just had friends, intended and mates. It was so simple. If one wanted to lay claim to someone, they merely introduced them as their intended. As in they intended to become mates with this person and were pursuing them to that end. Quarians had different stages of nuance to relationships. Friends, boy/girlfriend dependent on gender, intending, intended, and finally husband/wife. Looking up intended, Solana understood why Tali had reacted the way she did.

"Oh okay. Girlfriend. We, we haven't talked about things like that. He just sort of told me what his old job was and we packed up."

"So do you want to be?"

"Be what?" Tali asked

"His girlfriend." Solana slowly said the unfamiliar word. "Or would you rather be his intended?"

Tali flushed purple in response which earned a laugh from her sister. "I'll see about stealing one of his pillows for you. He's been sleeping on the couch in the living room since he back anyway. So he only needs one."

No matter how much Tali pried or even bribed, Solana refused to explain why her brother was sleeping on the couch. Tali eventually gave up and turned the conversation to other things. It was a good distraction and she enjoyed her afternoon out with her sister.

**A/N: So just in case anyone noticed, I did edit and reupload all the chapters written so far. Crazy I know that an English Teacher would do such a thing. All I did was fix time references so they should line up with each other. Chapters 1 and 2 cover everything from when Garrus and Tali were 35-43 and 14-22 respectively. This little drabble of mine that you are all reading then continues from the point Tali turned 22 and **_**Mass Effect **_** became a thing. And I know I didn't answer the one review I got about how Jane could read the scripts but I felt there was plenty in this chapter without shoehorning in even more. Plus I did throw in a small hint in Tali and Solana's lunch discussion.**

**I also changed titles having found one I liked much better as well as bumped the rating up to M so I can more safely get Garrus and Jane to talk about less pleasant things. I'm not sure if T would cover the rating though I don't plan on getting too graphic. Just covering my back is all.**


	8. Talks Hers

**The Show Must Go On (Talks Hers)**

Even after her talk with Solana Tali was still mad at him. It was going on 5 weeks now since he had come back, which meant it was coming up on 4 months since she had had a date night with him. And her birthday was coming up and she knew that Solana was planning a small party for her. Turning 23 wasn't a big production for quarians so the small party was probably all she was going to get. Not that Tali wanted a big huge production. Once in her life was enough. Still she really wished that she and Garrus were at least talking. It would make the looming birthday party less awkward. Because she knows that Solana will twist his mandible to make sure he shows up. And she'll pout at her father and whine to her mother if she had to, just to ensure that Garrus did make it to the party. There was no doubt that Solana was the major power broker of that household. At least when it came to the small things.

Even so Tali had embellished on what had become of the Garrus Vakarian character from _Mass Effect_. She was dropping teasers about what had happened to the cast after their victory on the Citadel. Garrus she had drummed out of C-Sec and turned him into a vigilante on a rock called Omega. She totally wasn't ripping off his last adventure. Or stranding his character on a rock in the middle of fictional nowhere. She wasn't being petty at all. Nope. Not at all.

The rest of the characters just sort of floated away. She had established that her own character went back to the Flotilla, a huge fleet of ships that the wandering vagabond quarians lived on in her imagination. It was a neat enough ending and it mercifully brought her acting career to a close. Yes she had now 4 dedicated assistants for the show, and a staff of writers and a plethora of other people working for her but she still had a firm hand on the direction of the show. She had guided where the show was going even if she didn't write every single word of dialogue.

Mercifully, most of the characters were either small enough that few cared, or just unpopular enough that no one cared. Wrex, was sent off on a vague quest to unite the shattered krogans. It would make for a nice cameo perhaps but the old krogan was busy with his shop. His affiliation with her show had brought his business to a whole new level and he was busier than ever. He'd renewed his contract with her to provide animals for the show but hadn't committed to any acting.

Ashley had been an okay character but didn't seem to be missed very much by the fans. Sure she had her supporters just like everyone else did but apart from being a the bigoted human that learns to be okay with aliens, her character had no real depth. And her agent had managed to get her another gig on some other show, so Ashley was gone. Much to her amusement, Tali did find that what few supporters Ashley did have on the forums, mostly wrote fan fiction that gender bent Jane into a man.

Alenko, of course, was dead. No one seemed to miss him at all. The writers just really didn't know what to do with him. So he just whined a lot really and seemed like an overgrown emo teenager in a man's body. Sure he was biotic but so was Jane and Liara so the biotics were well covered.

Liara's character was being left ambiguous on purpose. Tali was really hoping that if she twisted Adrian's arm hard enough he'd find wherever Jane was so that Tali could talk her into coming back to the show. Tali was fully prepared to go forward without Jane reprising her role as Commander Shepard, but she was popular with the fans. And Tali was also sort of hoping that maybe a dedicated miniseries between the Jane and Liara characters might earn her the forgiveness of the real Liara and Solana for killing off Jane in the first place. And maybe the fans might forgive her too. The forums were not a happy place the first few days after the second season teaser went out.

Chakwas and Joker were probably the only minor characters that anyone cared about. And their actors had thankfully not been part of the mass walk out. So they at the very least would be coming back for the second season as regulars.

All of this however left Tali in a bind. Well potentially. She'd struck gold with an unorthodox mixed cast of untested actors. Maybe she could do it again. Since _Mass Effect_ had done so well Tali had managed to make quite the fortune during the initial run of the show. Merchandising was doing great as well. The Team Shiara and Team Shakarian shirts were the biggest sellers. She was in talks about doing several comics and books to add back story to her little creation. Other people would of course do all the writing but Tali would maintain veto power on the final product. She had also been approached about some sort of game for omnitools.

All in all Tali had made spectacular amounts of money for her little 10 million credit investment. Yes it took more than that to produce all the episodes of the first season but advertizing deals had taken care of those costs. This time around she was going to make money on advertizing instead of breaking even. The show's value made sure of that.

So Tali was looking at a huge cast and also splitting the season into two parts. She felt there would be enough to last not only through this year's TV season but next as well. If she managed to keep her cast intact. Hopefully they would see what she was doing and stick around for their turn. Tali really wanted to explore her characters this time and was hoping to dedicate several episodes to each character. They had sort of done that in the first season but it wasn't take deep and had only been an episode each. Tali was also planning on doubling the size of the cast.

The majority would be humans. Even though she had made her name in the TV world as being that crazy young quarian chick that had used a mixed cast, humans were just a safe bet. It would help ease the collective minds of any potential investors. She'd need a turian, a quarian, and an asari at the very least to keep things mixed up enough. And to hit the major demographics that watched the show.

Krogan would be good too. For a show that presented krogan as vicious Tali thought her numbers were very good. She couldn't compete with the shows that did gardening or fishing but you can't win them all.

Tali had sent out a poll earlier in the year asking fans what they wanted in a new squad. Naturally there had been great moaning and groaning on the forums about how this would ruin everything forever. But some outside forces had looked at this as an opportunity.

A consortium of drell pleasure houses had contacted Tali. In exchange for a sizable investment, they wanted Tali to put a drell in the main cast. The only stipulation was the drell couldn't be in anyway associated with the pleasure industry. Apparently someone with too much money thought that showing a drell as a badass on TV might be people to think of drell as more than walking sex and hallucinogen dispensers. Which Tali was pretty sure was how the drell from this consortium made their money. But it was their money and not an insignificant amount either. So the sixth member of the cast and first confirmed alien was a drell.

Of course Tali publicized this. Being odd was what worked and what the public seemed to want. It also opened the flood gates in a weird way. People on the outside felt that if Tali was willing to do business with drell pleasure houses, she was willing to do business with anyone. She had to turn down more offers than she accepted. One man wanted to add energy guns that shot hole in space time which you could hop through. Someone else wanted to redo the Normandy with so called "warp" technology. Tali was making a scifi show, not a fantasy.

The saner offers usually came from collections of organizations or people that wanted to change their image. Since _Mass Effect_ reached across so many specie lines it made sense. There was a group that matched the drell investment to put a salarian into the show. The character was to be as nonthreatening as possible. For a show that had the main characters and her buddies shooting people that is.

Getting a krogan was probably the least painful process of all. Wrex came into her office with his nephew Runt in tow.

"Here's the deal. You put him in the show in my place and you get all your animal needs met for no charge. You still get your pets from me exclusively and maybe run a few ads and we'll call it good. What do you think?"

Tali took the deal. It saved her on doing a casting call for krogans and Runt was a nice guy. And a very experienced animal wrangler. A few decades working in his uncle's shop made sure of that. Plus he fit the stereotype she had put in her show about krogan. Big and imposing.

She did have to do a casting call for the humans. She made sure to get a good mix of the major groupings. She honestly hadn't thought they would come in so many colors or had that many groupings. It was a good group though. Two men, three women, and 3 major groups being represented.

Likewise Tali also had to cast her asari member. A veteran actress won the part easily. And she brought some real star power to the cast. Not that the human actors were slouches but Tali was overjoyed that she could attract an established star that wasn't on the tail end of her career.

That is how Tali spent her last month. In talks with various people putting her second season together. It wasn't all about the cast. She'd made a deal to change the way the guns worked in exchange for money and the potential for a toy contract. Heat sinks. Really what idiot would put a limit on weaponry that had near limitless ammo? Sure there were heat management issues but from what Adrian had told Tali, anyone that couldn't manage the heat on their weapon was an idiot and probably should be holding a gun anyway. However, money was money and so into the show it went.

Today though Tali wasn't sure what to expect. It could be a merchandising deal or a casting deal or ancestors only knew what. Tali had learned that meeting with a human meant to expect the unexpected. Tali stands up to greet the woman as she walks into her office. She is tall for a human at 6' flat Tali would guess, if she took away the heels both of them were wearing. She was dressed in a smart business pants suit much like Tali was and surprised the quarian by giving her the traditional quarian greeting, an air kiss on each cheek, which Tali automatically returned. Up close Tali could see that her makeup was expertly applied over her marble colored skin. Her eyes were a stunning deep blue that were almost black. Tali could barely make out the irises. Truly this lady was a stunning beauty. Tali hoped she wasn't after a part in the show. She wasn't sure that the "pretty" human named Miranda could handle the jealousy of being outshone.

"Please take a seat Miz Edwina Core." Tali said indicating one of the chair on the visitor's side of her desk.

"Thank you Miss Zorah." The woman in question took the seat she was offered though Tali could have sworn that not a single hair in that bob cut style had moved at all as she did.

"I understand you have a business proposal for me."

"Yes. It has come to the attention of those I represent that you are willing to have a mixed species cast as the heroes of a show." Edwina making eye contact with Tali.

Tali sighed and wondered if she had left out a human grouping. The casting people said know but right now she had a very well dressed woman in front of her that might say otherwise.

"Yes, part of _Mass Effect_ is to show everyone has the capacity to do good things, regardless of species." Tali said her scripted response.

"The group I represent were wondering just how far that attitude goes." Edwina said causing Tali to mentally flip through every species that might have been shown in a bad light on the show.

"Well, it goes as far as it needs to." Tali said holding the woman's stare. She really brushed up on quarian body language it seemed. Still, the woman had yet to blink which was a little unnerving.

"So it would even reach past an organic species and to a synthetic one?"

Of course. How could Tali not see this coming. Machines were an easy out for a bad guy in fiction even though there had never been a recorded mass uprising of robots. The closest thing to that was the mass awakening of the geth who were pretty happy to keep doing what they were doing. They had just had a few questions they wanted answers to. And Tali had made them part of the army of evil because they were cheap. Lots of shows used geth as bad guys and had very rudimentary models that weren't sentient available for rent.

"You're here about the geth." Tali stated as she sank back into her chair. When did her show become the go to public relations fixer?

"There are a few others I represent but yes. I am primarily here about the geth."

"I'm guessing you want something similar to the salarians or drell."

"The price has been deemed acceptable. We propose that a geth be place on the show in the main cast. And that the main bad guys be switched to another species."

Tali sat back up. That would cause a few issues and change a few things. Could it be done? She had lots more money to play with, she could afford way more extras and stuntmen now.

"That isn't the deal the drell nor salarians have. Changing the bad guys would be expensive and take some considerable rewriting."

"The show is not in production now Miss Zorah. You would have to rewrite nothing. However, it is understandable that such a change would increase costs. We are prepared to compensate for this." Edwina told Tali. By now Tali had lost count how many times she had blinked but was certain the woman sitting across from her hadn't.

"I'm sure we can work something out. Now you mentioned the geth were only your primary reason for being here. What are your other reasons?"

"With the exception of the asari, every sentient species has two genders; male and female. Those I represent would like to add a minor character to cast. A female character to the geth character who is to be male. This character, ideally, would eventually pursue a romantic relationship with one of the cast."

"That is a very bold suggestion. No one has ever done an organic-synthetic romance on screen before." Tali pointed out. In literature the theme was just common enough to not be considered too out there, but TV and movies had stayed very far away from that. And as far as Tali knew, no purely synthetic productions covered romance. They tended to cover things like the meaning of synthetic life.

"No one has made a successful mixed species cast before either. And we feel that _Mass Effect_ has shown enough precedent to be able to adequately do such a task." Said Edwina.

"I'm happy to hear that but I'm not sure I follow." Tali responded. _Mass Effect_ wasn't some day time soap opera that ran on relationships. There was a much larger over arching plot and the relationships were just part of the show.

"Did you know that 13.58% of your viewing audience are synthetics?" Edwina asked seemingly changing the subject.

"Yes I did actually." Tali replied. It was a surprising number really. Synthetics were known to absorb media as a means of sating their curiosity about organics. However their usual choice of material was usually talk shows, or home decor, or soap operas. Tali's brand of space opera didn't seem like a likely candidate for robot consumption. "I have to confess I'm not exactly sure why I draw in such a sizable portion of synthetics."

"It's primarily synthetics that associate themselves with the female gender that watch. However, all those that do were very interested in the relationship between the turian male and quarian female."

Tali blinked and took a moment to combat the light blush that had threatened to dust her cheeks.

"It is nothing to be embarrassed about."

Keelah. Tali had failed it seems. "Well." Tali didn't know what to say exactly. The characters in the show had a little romance because the real people were having one. That's not something to confess to someone you just met. Much less a potential business partner.

"We are aware of your real relationship with the real Garrus Vakarian. We are curious about his rather sudden departure from the show. But it is the relationship between those two that fascinates us." Edwina explained.

"Why?"

"In the show you have created a romance that precludes the physical aspect of most organic relationships. We have observed that most other shows place heavy bias on relationships being about physical attraction and coupling. Any emotional aspect is often underplayed and an afterthought. The relationship between the characters of Liara and Shepard is somewhat like this, though you did add a little more emotional to the equation than most would have."

Tali frowned. She didn't like being told that she was copying what other shows did even when she was doing exactly that. And she wasn't going to admit that the additional emotional input had only been done because Garrus had left. That relationship was to be for the feels while the Shiara one was to keep within normal TV parameters. Tali made a mental note to make sure to heap way more proper relationship stuff on Shiara. If she ever got that chance that was.

"So it's because the characters of Garrus and Tali aren't having a physical relationship that synthetics watch my show?"

"Yes. We predict that a physical relationship is plausible and would eventually happen but that would be years down the line. In accordance to the data presented in the show, the character of Tali is a minor and any physicality between her and the Garrus character would be illegal in that universe. However, it is the fact they still pursue a relationship of the mind that is attractive to us." Edwina elaborated.

"You're a synthetic. And a fan." Tali stated. It made sense. Edwina kept using 'we' and 'us' including herself in everything. And more telling was the way she hadn't moved an inch since she sat down. Her posture was the same and she hadn't even blinked once the entire meeting.

"I am." Was the guarded reply.

"You're proposal makes a lot more sense to me now is all. Though you need to alter your behavioral patterns a little. You haven't blinked in the last 15 minutes and organics can't go that long without blinking. And your posture is too stiff as well."

Edwina frowned at this. Or tried too. It took a second try to pull off the expression properly. "Thank you for the advice. I haven't been in this platform for very long."

"How long have you been in that platform, if I may ask."

"Two days. We felt you would respond better to our proposal if met with an organic analog."

"Any particular reason for choosing a human body?"

"It was deemed to be the most neutral of all the available chassis option. And humans had the most customization options available."

"I see." Tali said. The choice was a practical one and it made sense. The quarians might have pioneered AI tech and it was their geth creations what obtained sentience first, but humanity really liked to pushed the edge in just about everything. Once they got around to accepting it that is. Robosexuality, the human slang term for synthetic relations, was sort of not talked about by normal society in this day and age. It happened for sure but progress was a little slow. Humanity just moved so much faster than everyone else except maybe the salarians. Tali guessed that as normal for a species with a sub century life expectancy.

"So about this second synthetic character." Tali said bringing the conversation back to business. Even if Edwina might not seem like the conversation was headed down an awkward path, Tali sure knew it was and felt she should steer the conversation back to its original course. "You want it to be female and to have a romance with I'm assuming a male character?"

"Yes. It was felt that a traditional romance should be presented as to not 'rock the boat.'" Edwina paused as if to check she had used the expression correctly, and took Tali's silence as affirmation. With a nod of what Tali could only describe as satisfaction, Edwina continued, "However, we do not want to detracted from the main synthetic character. Our primary goal is to show that an independent synthetic can be part of an organic community."

"Just what do you mean by 'independent?' I mean I get that the character and most likely the actor themselves would be a sentient AI in a mobile platform."

"Yes the unit that has volunteered is a fully sentient AI. He is an example of what I mean by independent. His original purpose was to be a cook but he has recently expressed a desire to pursue other experiences. Most sentient AIs are quite content with continuing in their original role after awakening, provided they can pursue knowledge via the extranet." Edwina explained.

A cook. Tali knew it was too much to hope for an acting unit. Oh well, if a hardened cop like Garrus could turn into a half way decent actor. But then again, he was playing a hardened cop so it's not like he had to really stretch that far to get into character. Well, if Tali did take on this geth unit she'd easily make enough to give just about everyone but the actors a raise.

"I'm sure we can work something out with him." Tali was already thinking of the press release. The media was going to go nuts over this. "Now back to the female character. Do you have any specifics you are looking for?"

"We are hoping for a romance of the minds similar to what has occurred between the Garrus and Tali characters. A slow build up in the background. Given that you destroyed the _Normandy_ in the teaser trailer you released, we are proposing that this female synthetic be the next vehicle's AI."

"That could work." Tali said slowly. It made sense story wise as well. They would need to have some sort of visual way of displaying the AI's presence. Yes she would be the ship but they would still need some visual cue for the audience to let them know that she was in the scene. Which lead to the next issue. Who would fall in love with a ship. Granted anyone could fall in love with anyone else. Or anything else she supposed but Edwina and those she represented seemed a bit concerned about appearing normal. Or as normal as one could get with this sort of thing.

Well an engineer would certainly appreciate a ship. Or maybe even the pilot. Yes the pilot. She'd have to talk to Jeff about this but the funny man seemed to be onboard for just about anything. And they could do it really slow and subtle too.

"Perhaps we can have the pilot strike up a relationship with the new ship's AI. We were planning on having him be the one to show off the new ship in the series premiere. The AI would be a good balance for the wise cracker." Tali could almost see Edwina's processors scour the extranet to look up the term 'wise cracker'.

The AI finally blinked in understanding. "We find that arrangement agreeable. Do you have idea of the time table for the romance?"

"Not really. Any such romance would be a long time in coming. Season two is to be a much larger installment than the first season was. Might even take two years to complete."

"That is acceptable. As I stated before, a slow burn romance is agreeable. Our research shows that emotional connections take a long time to set in to be believable. Additionally, slow gradual change is accepted more than sudden changes."

"Do you have one in particular to do the voice acting for the ship?" Tali asked. So far everyone that had suggest a character also had someone in mind for said character. The drell had, the salarians had, Edwina had her geth cook. Why wouldn't she have someone in mind for the second character she was proposing?

"I would nominate myself. I am the longest running AI in our collective and feel the most comfortable dealing with organics. That is why I was chosen to be the one to negotiate with you."

Tali had to admit that Edwina had a very nice voice. "Would you be willing to come down to the studio on filming days? I realize you are only doing a voice but seeing what the other actors are doing might help you with your voice acting. "

"Yes." Was the short response.

"Well, it seems we are in agreement." Tali stood up signaling the end of the meeting. "One of my assistants will be in touch with you once we have a draft contract ready. We need to talk hard numbers. I'd like to meet this geth chef of yours at some people before we start up in the fall if possible as well."

**A/N:** I failed to hit the 5k mark but the original chapter sort of got away from me. And the tone of the second half was very different from the first so I decided it would be best to post up the second half as its own chapter.

Legion in a chef's hat was such a cute mental image I had to write it. I imagine Legion calmly moving through a recipe while Wrex and Garrus would be in the background arguing, throwing ingredients and insults at each other. Off camera Tali would be wondering why she even is producing this cooking show.


	9. Talks His

**The Show Must Go On (Talks His)**

**Garrus is going to have a chat with Jane but he isn't going to find her in a very nice place. And she hasn't been spending the last few months living the high life either. Brief summery at the end of the section.**

Garrus was going to be so happy to sleep in his own bed again. He'd spent the last month sleeping on the couch in the common living area. He could have taken the guest bedroom but Liara was officially using it during her frequent stay overs. He was sure that his father knew as he did that Liara spent her nights in Solana's bed. But if his step-mother wanted to maintain the illusion that her little girl was still a virgin little angel Garrus wasn't going to stop her.

Fortunately he had no need to maintain such illusions about himself. His father was a little more down to Palaven about things. Garrus had made his father a grandfather when Leto the elder was just 64. Had things been normal than grandchildren should only begin to be coming now, some 20 years later. But Garrus wasn't good at normal. After all, normal people don't blow a small fortune on expanding a house on the Citadel. Normal people would have just moved.

A fun fact about the Citadel is that nothing on it was static. Every wall, floor, roof, and tile could be moved around. Only the keepers were allowed to do it because only they understood how to do it safely. And it was expensive as all get out. There was a reason real estate on the Citadel was the most expensive in the known galaxy. But Garrus let himself be hopeful and had spent all of his bounty money from the last job on a rather large addition to his living area.

A small bathroom connected to a modest bedroom wasn't going to cut it anymore. He had bought enough space to expand the bathroom, added a small foyer to give additional privacy, made his bedroom into an office, thrown in a small kitchenette and dining area, and created a master bedroom. And to appease his step-mother for all the construction noise and inconvenience he was causing he gave her the money to do that kitchen remodeling she had been hounding his father for.

Garrus was fairly sure his little building project had put ideas into his sister's head. She'd become very interested in helping plan the extension and taken notes on the costs. Garrus idly wondered if Liara might become a more permanent fixture at the Vakarian residence. And he wondered just how Solana was going to convince her mother to allow it. Normal turians don't settle down until they are 40 or so and that is even considered on the young side. Then again, normal turians don't have a quarian sister.

Speaking of quarians, it was because of the brother of that particular pair that he was trudging through the deep lower wards. When Liara and Solana came to him asking him for a favor in finding Jane, he had stayed out of it. He'd gotten their side of the story and it was enough to convince him that it was their problem not his. If Jane didn't want to be found then that was her business. The girls though hadn't given up and had hounded Adrian until he broke.

Solana was a force to be reckoned with but Adrian had learned to put up with her over the years. Liara was a new and unknown element in the equation but she had appealed to his emotional side instead of trying to use blunt force to get what she wanted. Garrus could see that she was good for his sister. However, the thing that broke Adrian was his sister. Garrus had never known Adrian to stand up to his sister for very long and once she joined forces with the forlorn lovers the young quarian had buckled under the pressure.

At least he had tried to be discreet about it. Which might have worked if Adrian had been anyone else. It was technically against regulations but every now and again someone would need a favor that might require C-Sec capabilities. C-Sec had a great intelligence network and a few favors here and there normally got you what you wanted to know. Unfortunately for Adrian, everyone knew just whose protégé he was. It wasn't long before someone had told Garrus that Adrian was trying to cash in his few favors for information about a certain redheaded TV star that had dropped off the grid.

So Garrus had stepped in and used a few of his favors instead. The kid really didn't have enough favors to burn just yet. He was still a uniform and the kinds of favors he had to cash in wouldn't have taken him very far anyway. Now when a respected and known lead detective puts out word he wants to find someone, then things get done.

It was all off the books of course but it had only taken a few days to find her. In the mean time Garrus had gathered all the information he could on one Johanna "Jane" Jones. There was very little on Johanna "Jane" Jones. She'd magically appeared on the Citadel a few years ago. She'd worked at a restaurant as a server and acted in a few commercials. Until she hit it big with _Mass Effect_. Since people don't magically appear out of nowhere Garrus had dug deeper using what few clues he had. And those were third hand as any possible personal information had been filtered through Tali who told Solana and Liara, who told him. But Garrus wasn't a lead detective for nothing and had managed to narrow down a few possible planets that had matched the description of being mining planets. That did fishing with explosives. And had middle school drop outs turned prostitutes.

It was hard to narrow it down further than that. The records he found were of arrests and releases of girls that matched the physical description. The charges were always the same. Prostitution and drug use and/or trafficking. It would be impossible to tell which of the handful of profiles he had were Jane's until he talked to her. That is if he had even found her profile. It was evident that she had changed her name, possibly even stolen the identity, when she came to the Citadel.

His tips had lead him to the deep lower wards and he was glad he had come in civilian dress. Glasses and a hat helped with his disguise. He found the building he was looking for. It looked run down and seedy, even considering the surrounding area. The deeper one went into the lower wards the darker and grimier things got. Every place had its poor, even the bright and shiny Citadel.

Garrus pushed open the door of the apartment block. Inside was dimly lit and the air was stale with alcohol and sex. To his right he could see a hall way with doors on either side. A small red or green light was above each door indicating if the room as ready for visitors or not. In front of him was a check in desk. This must have been a motel before. No wonder it had been converted into a brothel. The manager, for lack of a better term, was a cool looking asari who was studying him with her eyes. No doubt gauging him as a customer.

"What can I get you?" The manager asked.

"A friend of mine was in here and said you had a fine redheaded human gal. Great fuck and even better cock sucker. Knew all sorts of biotic tricks." Garrus said sliding up to the counter.

"Maybe we do, maybe we don't. But we do offer those sorts of services here. If you can afford them. And I hope you can. Not every day we get a turian as built as you in here." The manager punctuated the end of her sentence by slowly running her tongue across her lips.

"I'm sure I can show a girl a good time, provided you have what I'm looking for." Garrus said shooting down the manager's clear advance on him. This earned him a pout. Before it could become much more Garrus quickly produced a small plastic bag with red powder in it. "And I can pay, as you can see."

The manager made to reach for it but Garrus kept the bag out of reach. "Do you have the girl I'm looking for or not?"

"She's busy right now. And supposed to have a break after seeing customers."

"I'll wait. And surely it can't hurt if she sees me right after. I don't want to wait that long." Garrus produced a second small baggy. That sealed it. It was fortunate the manager was an asari. They had a special weakness for red sand. Even if the manager wasn't an asari, red sand was a known currency in the lower wards.

Garrus had made Adrian buy the drugs for him as payment for taking up the hunt for Jane. Plus everyone assumed a kid with Adrians background was a druggy anyway. In reality what Garrus had done was introduce Adrian to one of the drug runners who skirted the more gray areas of the law. He'd been a long time quasi-ally of C-Sec but only for the right people and the right sort of favors. Garrus was one of those people. Introducing Adrian was just a step in helping Adrian set up the sort of contacts he'd need as a detective in the future.

Garrus waited until one of the lights down the hall turned from green to red and the door opened letting out a pair of krogan businessmen. They were slumming it to get their thrills judging from the suits they were wearing. Once they had exited the building the asari manager escorted Garrus down the hall and let him into the room the krogans had come out of. With a call of "Holler if you want more company" the manager left leaving Garrus to close the door behind him.

He could see why Jane was supposed to have a half hour break. It was to clean up. She was still splayed out on the bed naked, fluids leaking from her exposed sex and the side of her mouth. It was a miracle she wasn't torn in half or bleeding. If it weren't for the small rise and fall of her chest Garrus would have thought she was dead. She looked a lot skinnier then he remembered her. What the hell had happened to her in the last 4 months?

"Jane." Garrus called out but didn't get a response. He did a quick sweep of the room, which he should have done in the first place but had been rather shocked by what he had found. The room was dank and mostly bare. The bed dirty with stains of obvious use, and the wall barren. There wasn't any camera that Garrus could see. In fact, apart from a single dresser that had seen better days, the bed and the small night stand next to the bed, the room was empty. On the night stand was a small button, which if Garrus had to hazard a guess was what switched the light outside above the door green and red.

Garrus went to Jane's side and looked her over clinically. She didn't appear to be drugged even though her eyes were dull and had a faraway look to them. He figured she had retreated from this place into the safety of her own mind. He'd seen this sort of thing before during his time as a uniform. With rape victims mostly, but the few times he'd been part of busting a prostitution ring he'd seen this look in their eyes as well. Once the krogans had finished with her she must have moved just enough to hit the button before just lying there. She must know she has a half hour to herself and retreated from the world for some of it.

Garrus checked the dresser. Inside were a meager collection of clothing and an empty suitcase at the bottom of the dresser. He packed what there was to pack leaving out a dress he could put on Jane once she was more responsive and collected the few toiletries he found.

After about 15 minutes of waiting Jane finally started to stir. Still she didn't react to Garrus at all. So he watched her mechanically get up and limp to the bathroom leaving a trail of fluids on the floor. He'd thought she'd stopped leaking by but with gravity kicking in, clearly he was wrong. Garrus listened as the water in the shower turned on. He could hear when she stepped under the water and listened to her cleanse herself. He had packed away the towel that was hanging in the bathroom so he had to listen for when the water turned off to give it to her.

Once the falling of water could no longer be heard Garrus got up and entered the bathroom. He handed Jane the towel and she took it as it was the most natural thing to do. Now he was getting really worried. He'd sort of been down this hole himself, but he'd had work and a son to keep him from going too deep. Hopefully Liara and Solana could be enough for Jane. Though he wondered if he was really doing everyone a favor by finding her. He was really doubting his plan now. If she was this far gone already...

She dried herself off in a stiff mechanical manner she was doing everything else. This was routine then Garrus observed. She could shut off her mind and still get things done. Near as he could tell the show had wrapped almost 2 months ago, right before he got back to the Citadel. Just how fast did she fall? Given her alleged background though he could see it. She'd probably gotten down in the dumps over something and turned to drugs for comfort. Drugs would be old and familiar and thus a comfort in themselves, apart from the chemical highs. Drugs of course cost money and she had been a wild partier. He'd seen the pictures of the parties himself.

And once all the money was gone she'd probably gone back to prostitution to sustain herself. The theory made sense. He was apprehensive about his sister being in a relationship with someone with a such a colored past but he was no prize either. He had his demons; his own drug issues and as far as he knew, Jane hadn't killed anyone. She had that up on him at least. Probably.

Garrus watched Jane put on a simple green dress he had left hanging in the dresser. It was sleeveless with a gaping neckline that showed plenty of Jane's ample cleavage. And it only dropped down a third of the way down her thighs. But it did the job of covering her up and that was good enough for now.

Garrus checked the time on his omnitool. The half hour was almost up and just like clockwork, when it was the light came back to Jane's eyes. If light could be the word to describe it. There was no shine like he remembered when Jane was playing Commander Shepard. That had been a bright burning inferno full of life. This was the dying embers of that fire. Then again, Commander Shepard was a person Jane had taken to and enjoyed from what he could tell. Whatever persona she had on now was one necessary for survival. Nothing more.

Jane started, having finally reacted to his presence. "Garrus, what are you doing here?" The question added a little more warmth to her eyes. Garrus wondered when the last time she had seen a friendly face.

"I came here originally to help and talk to you. However, after spending the last half hour with a mindless drone, I'm here to talk to you. And maybe to help you."

"Okay..."

"Look, we're friends right? Or at least we got on well enough on set. Either way I'll help if I can but you have to give me a reason to help you." Garrus explained.

"Then why are you here in the first place?" Jane reinstated her original question.

"Solana and Liara sent me." Garrus moved to the corner of the bed and sat on it, leaving a respectable distance between the redhead and himself. "In a manner of speaking. They miss you. They're a half step away from offering up a reward to find you."

"What? No they can't find me. Especially not like this."

"I couldn't agree more." Garrus' agreement put a shocked expression on Jane's face. "You are a mess if you're reduced to this sort of work. Again."

"Again? What do you mean by 'again?'" Jane's eyes narrowed as she did her best to do something. Possibly intimidate Garrus. He wasn't sure, but the look had no effect on him whatsoever.

"Given what you told Tali, and what I could find, you are one of several working girls from mining worlds that came to the Citadel to seek a better life. One, I might add, you threw away for some unknown reason." That seemed to take what little wind there was in Jane's sails and deflate her. Good, it would be better if she was as non-confrontational as possible.

"They shouldn't be around a person like me."

"Probably not." Garrus agreed. Honestly, if it were up to him he wouldn't be here. However, Solana and Tali teaming up to get something made it impossible to say no. Especially now that they actually had more resources then just sad pouts and pleading eyes. Still, Garrus wasn't going to bring Jane back and present her like everything was okay. Because it wasn't. There would be a lot of issues to work out before things could even begin to go back to being okay. "But, that doesn't stop them from loving you."

Garrus' words were met with silence. "You know, everyone has a past. We're not always proud of it, but it shapes us. Molds us into what we are today. You've fallen back into your past. I've recently come back from doing the same thing. That doesn't make us bad people or unlovable. If anything it just makes things harder for everyone and turns people like us into idiots."

More silence. Except Jane's expression had changed to one of great interest as she silently urged Garrus to continue talking.

"From what Tali told me, you have a good idea of what I used to do."

"You killed people. Because hunting implies failure." Jane stated flatly.

"Tali knows that and she still loves me despite of it." That really seemed to get the human's attention. "You can't just turn off how you feel. Not for any real length of time anyway. You've been trying to convince yourself you're unlovable and all that time Solana and Liara still loved you from afar. They still love you now. And your friends still care about you. But all of that doesn't matter if you shut yourself off from everyone and everything. At the end of the day no one can save you but yourself. Everyone else can only help. Believe me, I've been down the road you're on right now."

"What?" Garrus wasn't sure what the expression on Jane's face was this time. It seemed to be a mix between shock, disbelief, and relief.

"I wasn't in this exact line of work but I know what it is like to have to be intimate with strangers for a job. And to do so against your will. It eats at you, drains your soul. I know you know what that is like. I can see it in your eyes."

Jane just nodded in silent agreement.

"If you keep going down this road I imagine you'll end up dead soon enough. Maybe a patron gets too rough or you overdose on something. Either way, it won't be pretty. You have a chance though Jane. You can crawl out of this hole you've dug. Get a real job again. Be a real person again. There are those that want to help you be a real person again, but all their work and effort won't mean anything if you don't decide to live like a real person."

"Real job." Jane snorted. "What sort of person would hire someone who's last job fucking anyone who had the money?"

"Well before that you were a popular actress on a TV show. Tali is pretty desperate to have you back as Commander Shepard."

"I died."

"Yes, you did. And you are still dying right now. But you can rise up from the depths, Jane. It's a TV show, they can cook up any explanation they want to put you back on it." Garrus reasoned. It wouldn't be the first time a character was killed off and put back in a TV show. It would be up there through with the fastest turnarounds from dead to alive again. "Learning to actually read the scripts might make a little easier. Actually learning to read in general makes things easier. How did you do it by the way? You always knew your lines even when we had rewrites."

"I had an electronic reader read me the entire script. And I just memorized the changes when you guys would talk about them." Jane muttered sheepishly. And it made immediate sense to Garrus. Everything was electronic so everyone got their scripts and the rewrites on their omnitools. Plus Jane's costume had an ear piece that she could use to pipe the script into her ear without anyone ever knowing.

"What have you been using to combat your depression?"

Jane's shock was quite clear this time. "What?"

"You're depressed. Deeply so I would wager. The sex is just part of the job judging from how your eyes glazed over when I found you. And not in a good way glazed over. That isn't driving you to stay alive. So I figure you must be using drugs of some sort."

"And if I am?" Was the guarded reply.

"I just want to know is all. Been there too. Combat stims. Hell of a high. Hell of a crash. Spent a month in rehab. Tali wasn't happy at all." Garrus let out a small chuckle.

"I can imagine." Jane wryly commented.

"If you want to get out of here drugs can't be the reason you get up in the morning."

"I know."

"You have to find a new purpose in life. What that is only you will know. I found purpose in my work and my son. That's what got me out of my hole. I stay out for Tali. No one can force you to find one, but we can help Jane."

"I know."

It was Garrus' turn to sit in silence. He'd said what he needed to and wasn't sure what more he could add.

"You done talking to me?" Jane asked.

"Yes."

"Are you going to help me?"

"Depends."

"On what?"

"If you want to be helped or not."

"Yes." This time Jane's response was barely more than a quiet plea.

"Okay then." Garrus watched the relief visibly wash over Jane's features. He let her have a moment before continuing on. "There will be rules though and it won't be easy."

"Of course."

"You have to go to rehab."

"Naturally." Jane agreed.

"You need to get a real job of some sort."

"I will." Jane promised quickly.

"You have to let us help you. You aren't alone Jane. It's going to be hard the next few weeks while you go through withdrawal and all that fun stuff but you aren't in it alone. If you need to you can always talk to me. Like I said, I've gone through what you have. Trust me when I say having people around you helps. Now what do you say we get out of this place?"

Leaving the brothel wasn't as simple as just walking out the door. Garrus had to knock out two bataarian who were enforcers. They were big guys too but Garrus was bigger. Once they were down Garrus flashed his badge at the manager who was glowing blue with biotic energy.

"Now look. We can do this the hard way or the easy way. The hard way is you keep your biotics up and we mess up your lovely little office here. That will piss me off and after I get done beating your ass I will come back with my C-Sec buddies. And we will close you down. And then we'll find out who your friends are and close them down. Or we do this the easy way and you let me walk out of here with my friend. I'll pretend this place doesn't exist. So what's it going to be?"

The C-Sec badge helped but it carried little power this deep in the Citadel. It was probably the fact he had taken off his gloves and was brandishing his talons that got the manager to back down. Biotics or no, turian talons were well known for leaving some very nasty scares.

Once they were outside and safely on their way Jane spoke up again. "Remind me never to get you angry."

"It's a smart policy to never get anyone angry." Garrus replied. The rest of the trip was in silence between them. Garrus made a few calls. One to Adrian and one to a doctor friend of his who he could trust to be discrete. Garrus just hoped he wouldn't regret his decision to bust her out of that brothel. He wasn't too afraid of anything the owners might do. He was more afraid of things not working out like everyone at home was hoping for. It would devastate just about everyone involved and probably drive Jane back down that hole so deep there wouldn't be any chance of saving her. So, Garrus hoped things worked out. The alternative was too grim to think about.

**Summary: Garrus talks Jane into seeking treatment and reintegrating back into regular life. He talks about how he has a bad past as well, but that doesn't stop Tali from loving him. Just like Jane's past doesn't stop Solana and Liara from loving her. Jane also reveals that she managed to learn all her lines for the TV show by having her omnitool read her the electronic scripts in their entirety and memorized them.**

**A/N: **To my 4th reviewer who reviewed as a guest: I don't have a beta reader nor do I have an editor. And yes these go up pretty much as soon as I'm done with them. Originally this was to be a one shot ending with chapter 1. Then I decided to do Tali's side of things. Then I just sort of kept going as I realized there was a lot more story to tell. Anyway, here is the latest installment. No promises on ETA or when I will get around to adding in more commas. I'll get around to doing more editing someday. But first Garrus and Tali have to spend some time together. 4 hours together in the span of 4 months is a little cruel on my part. I must fix this.


End file.
